Harold Brookenham, whom Mr. Cashmore, ushered in and announced, had found in the act of helping himself to a cup of tea at the table apparently just prepared—Harold Brookenham arrived at the point with a dash so direct as to leave the visitor an option between but two suppositions: that of a desperate plunge, to have his shame soon over, or that of the acquired habit of such appeals, which had taught him the easiest way. There was no great sharpness in the face of Mr. Cashmore, who was somehow massive without majesty; yet he mightn’t have been proof against the suspicion that his young friend’s embarrassment was an easy precaution, a conscious corrective to the danger of audacity. It wouldn’t have been impossible to divine that if Harold shut his eyes and jumped it was mainly for the appearance of doing so. Experience was to be taken as showing that one might get a five-pound note as one got a light for a cigarette; but one had to check the friendly impulse to ask for it in the same way. Mr. Cashmore had in fact looked surprised, yet not on the whole so surprised as the young man seemed to have expected of him. There was almost a quiet grace in the combination of promptitude and diffidence with which Harold took over the responsibility of all proprietorship of the crisp morsel of paper that he slipped with slow firmness into the pocket of his waistcoat, rubbing it gently in its passage against the delicately buff-coloured duck of which that garment was composed. “So quite too awfully kind of you that I really don’t know what to say”—there was a marked recall, in the manner of this speech, of the sweetness of his mother’s droop and the tenderness of her wail. It was as if he had been moved for the moment to moralise, but the eyes he raised to his benefactor had the oddest effect of marking that personage himself as a theme for the moralist.

Mr. Cashmore, who would have been very red-haired if he had not been very bald, showed a single eye-glass and a long upper lip; he was large and jaunty, with little petulant movements and intense ejaculations that were not in the line of his type. “You may say anything you like if you don’t say you’ll repay it. That’s always nonsense—I hate it.”

Harold remained sad, but showed himself really superior. “Then I won’t say it.” Pensively, a minute, he appeared to figure the words, in their absurdity, on the lips of some young man not, like himself, tactful. “I know just what you mean.”

“But I think, you know, that you ought to tell your father,” Mr. Cashmore said.

“Tell him I’ve borrowed of you?”

Mr. Cashmore good-humouredly demurred. “It would serve me right—it’s so wretched my having listened to you. Tell him, certainly,” he went on after an instant. “But what I mean is that if you’re in such straits you should speak to him like a man.”

Harold smiled at the innocence of a friend who could suppose him not to have exhausted that resource. “I’m ALWAYS speaking to him like a man, and that’s just what puts him so awfully out. He denies to my face that I AM one. One would suppose, to hear him, not only that I’m a small objectionable child, but that I’m scarcely even human. He doesn’t conceive me as with human wants.”

“Oh,” Mr. Cashmore laughed, “you’ve all—you youngsters—as many wants, I know, as an advertisement page of the Times.”

Harold showed an admiration. “That’s awfully good. If you think you ought to speak of it,” he continued, “do it rather to mamma.” He noted the hour. “I’ll go, if you’ll excuse me, to give you the chance.”

The visitor referred to his own watch. “It’s your mother herself who gives the chances—the chances YOU take.”

Harold looked kind and simple. “She HAS come in, I know. She’ll be with you in a moment.”

He was halfway to the door, but Mr. Cashmore, though so easy, had not done with him. “I suppose you mean that if it’s only your mother who’s told, you may depend on her to shield you.”

Harold turned this over as if it were a questionable sovereign, but on second thoughts he wonderfully smiled. “Do you think that after you’ve let me have it you can tell? You could, of course, if you hadn’t.” He appeared to work it out for Mr. Cashmore’s benefit. “But I don’t mind,” he added, “your telling mamma.”

“Don’t mind, you mean really, its annoying her so awfully?”

The invitation to repent thrown off in this could only strike the young man as absurd—it was so previous to any enjoyment. Harold liked things in their proper order; but at the same time his evolutions were quick. “I dare say I AM selfish, but what I was thinking was that the terrific wigging, don’t you know?—well, I’d take it from HER. She knows about one’s life—about our having to go on, by no fault of our own, as our parents start us. She knows all about wants—no one has more than mamma.”

Mr. Cashmore soundlessly glared his amusement. “So she’ll say it’s all right?”

“Oh no; she’ll let me have it hot. But she’ll recognise that at such a pass more must be done for a fellow, and that may lead to something—indirectly, don’t you see? for she won’t TELL my father, she’ll only, in her own way, work on him—that will put me on a better footing and for which therefore at bottom I shall have to thank YOU!”

The eye assisted by Mr. Cashmore’s glass had with a discernible growth of something like alarm fixed during this address the subject of his beneficence. The thread of their relations somehow lost itself in the subtler twist, and he fell back on mere stature, position and property, things always convenient in the presence of crookedness. “I shall say nothing to your mother, but I think I shall be rather glad you’re not a son of mine.”

Harold wondered at this new element in their talk. “Do your sons never—?”

“Borrow money of their mother’s visitors?” Mr. Cashmore had taken him up, eager, evidently, quite to satisfy him; but the question was caught on the wing by Mrs. Brookenham herself, who had opened the door as her friend spoke and who quickly advanced with an echo of it.

“Lady Fanny’s visitors?”—and, though her eyes rather avoided than met his own, she seemed to cover her ladyship’s husband with a vague but practised sympathy. “What on earth are you saying to Harold about them?” Thus it was that at the end of a few minutes Mr. Cashmore, on the sofa face to face with her, found his consciousness quite purged of its actual sense of his weakness and a new turn given to the idea of what, in one’s very drawing-room, might go on behind one’s back. Harold had quickly vanished—had been tacitly disposed of, and Mrs. Brook’s caller had moved even in the short space of time so far in another direction as to have drawn from her the little cold question: “‘Presents’? You don’t mean money?”

He clearly felt the importance of expressing at least by his silence and his eye-glass what he meant. “Her extravagance is beyond everything, and though there are bills enough, God knows, that do come in to me, I don’t see how she pulls through unless there are others that go elsewhere.”

Mrs. Brookenham had given him his tea—her own she had placed on a small table near her; and she could now respond freely to the impulse felt, on this, of settling herself to something of real interest. Except to Harold she was incapable of reproach, though there were of course shades in her resignation, and her daughter’s report of her to Mr. Longdon as conscious of an absence of prejudice would have been justified for a spectator by the particular feeling that Mr. Cashmore’s speech caused her to disclose. What did this feeling wonderfully appear unless strangely irrelevant? “I’ve no patience when I hear you talk as if you weren’t horribly rich.”

He looked at her an instant as if guessing she might have derived that impression from Harold. “What has that to do with it? Does a rich man enjoy any more than a poor his wife’s making a fool of him?”

Her eyes opened wider: it was one of her very few ways of betraying amusement. There was little indeed to be amused at here except his choice of the particular invidious name. “You know I don’t believe a word you say.”

Mr. Cashmore drank his tea, then rose to carry the cup somewhere and put it down, declining with a motion any assistance. When he was on the sofa again he resumed their intimate talk. “I like tremendously to be with you, but you mustn’t think I’ve come here to let you say to me such dreadful things as that.” He was an odd compound, Mr. Cashmore, and the air of personal good health, the untarnished bloom which sometimes lent a monstrous serenity to his mention of the barely mentionable, was on occasion balanced or matched by his playful application of extravagant terms to matters of much less moment. “You know what I come to you for, Mrs. Brook: I won’t come any more if you’re going to be horrid and impossible.”

“You come to me, I suppose, because—for my deep misfortune, I assure you—I’ve a kind of vision of things, of the wretched miseries in which you all knot yourselves up, which you yourselves are as little blessed with as if, tumbling about together in your heap, you were a litter of blind kittens.”

“Awfully good that—you do lift the burden of my trouble!” He had laughed out in the manner of the man who made notes for platform use of things that might serve; but the next moment he was grave again, as if his observation had reminded him of Harold’s praise of his wit. It was in this spirit that he abruptly brought out: “Where, by the way, is your daughter?”

“I haven’t the least idea. I do all I can to enter into her life, but you can’t get into a railway train while it’s on the rush.”

Mr. Cashmore swung back to hilarity. “You give me lots of things. Do you mean she’s so ‘fast’?” He could keep the ball going.

Mrs. Brookenham obliged him with what she meant. “No; she’s a tremendous dear, and we’re great friends. But she has her free young life, which, by that law of our time that I’m sure I only want, like all other laws, once I know what they ARE, to accept—she has her precious freshness of feeling which I say to myself that, so far as control is concerned, I ought to respect. I try to get her to sit with me, and she does so a little, because she’s kind. But before I know it she leaves me again: she feels what a difference her presence makes in one’s liberty of talk.”

Mr. Cashmore was struck by this picture. “That’s awfully charming of her.”

“Isn’t it too dear?” The thought of it, for Mrs. Brook, seemed fairly to open out vistas. “The modern daughter!”

“But not the ancient mother!” Mr. Cashmore smiled.

She shook her head with a world of accepted woe. “‘Give me back, give me back one hour of my youth’! Oh I haven’t a single thrill left to answer a compliment. I sit here now face to face with things as they are. They come in their turn, I assure you—and they find me,” Mrs. Brook sighed, “ready. Nanda has stepped on the stage and I give her up the house. Besides,” she went on musingly, “it’s awfully interesting. It IS the modern daughter—we’re really ‘doing’ her, the child and I; and as the modern has always been my own note—I’ve gone in, I mean, frankly for my very own Time—who is one, after all, that one should pretend to decline to go where it may lead?” Mr. Cashmore was unprepared with an answer to this question, and his hostess continued in a different tone: “It’s sweet her sparing one!”

This, for the visitor, was firmer ground. “Do you mean about talking before her?”

Mrs. Brook’s assent was positively tender. “She won’t have a difference in my freedom. It’s as if the dear thing KNEW, don’t you see? what we must keep back. She wants us not to have to think. It’s quite maternal!” she mused again. Then as if with the pleasure of presenting it to him afresh: “That’s the modern daughter!”

“Well,” said Mr. Cashmore, “I can’t help wishing she were a trifle less considerate. In that case I might find her with you, and I may tell you frankly that I get more from her than I do from you. She has the great merit for me, in the first place, of not being such an admirer of my wife.”

Mrs. Brookenham took this up with interest. “No—you’re right; she doesn’t, as I do, SEE Lady Fanny, and that’s a kind of mercy.”

“There you are then, you inconsistent creature,” he cried with a laugh: “after all you DO believe me! You recognise how benighted it would be for your daughter not to feel that Fanny’s bad.”

“You’re too tiresome, my dear man,” Mrs. Brook returned, “with your ridiculous simplifications. Fanny’s NOT ‘bad’; she’s magnificently good—in the sense of being generous and simple and true, too adorably unaffected and without the least mesquinerie. She’s a great calm silver statue.”

Mr. Cashmore showed, on this, something of the strength that comes from the practice of public debate. “Then why are you glad your daughter doesn’t like her?”

Mrs. Brook smiled as with the sadness of having too much to triumph. “Because I’m not, like Fanny, without mesquinerie. I’m not generous and simple. I’m exaggeratedly anxious about Nanda. I care, in spite of myself, for what people may say. Your wife doesn’t—she towers above them. I can be a shade less brave through the chance of my girl’s not happening to feel her as the rest of us do.”

Mr. Cashmore too heavily followed. “To ‘feel’ her?”

Mrs. Brook floated over. “There would be in that case perhaps something to hint to her not to shriek on the house-tops. When you say,” she continued, “that one admits, as regards Fanny, anything wrong, you pervert dreadfully what one does freely grant—that she’s a great glorious pagan. It’s a real relief to know such a type—it’s like a flash of insight into history. None the less if you ask me why then it isn’t all right for young things to ‘shriek’ as I say, I have my answer perfectly ready.” After which, as her visitor seemed not only too reduced to doubt it, but too baffled to distinguish audibly, for his credit, between resignation and admiration, she produced: “Because she’s purely instinctive. Her instincts are splendid—but it’s terrific.”

“That’s all I ever maintained it to be!” Mr. Cashmore cried. “It IS terrific.”

“Well,” his friend answered, “I’m watching her. We’re all watching her. It’s like some great natural poetic thing—an Alpine sunrise or a big high tide.”

“You’re amazing!” Mr. Cashmore laughed. “I’m watching her too.”

“And I’m also watching YOU!” Mrs. Brook lucidly continued. “What I don’t for a moment believe is that her bills are paid by any one. It’s MUCH more probable,” she sagaciously observed, “that they’re not paid at all.”

“Oh well, if she can get on that way—!”

“There can’t be a place in London,” Mrs. Brook pursued, “where they’re not delighted to dress such a woman. She shows things, don’t you see? as some fine tourist region shows the placards in the fields and the posters on the rocks. And what proof can you adduce?” she asked.

Mr. Cashmore had grown restless; he picked a stray thread off the knee of his trousers. “Ah when you talk about ‘adducing’—!” He appeared to intimate—as with the hint that if she didn’t take care she might bore him—that it was the kind of word he used only in the House of Commons.

“When I talk about it you can’t meet me,” she placidly returned. But she fixed him with her weary penetration. “You try to believe what you CAN’T believe, in order to give yourself excuses. And she does the same—only less, for she recognises less in general the need of them. She’s so grand and simple.”

Poor Mr. Cashmore stared. “Grander and simpler than I, you mean?”

Mrs. Brookenham thought. “Not simpler—no; but very much grander. She wouldn’t, in the case you conceive, recognise really the need of WHAT you conceive.”

Mr. Cashmore wondered—it was almost mystic. “I don’t understand you.”

Mrs. Brook, seeing it all from dim depths, tracked it further and further. “We’ve talked her over so!”

Mr. Cashmore groaned as if too conscious of it. “Indeed we have!”

“I mean WE”—and it was wonderful how her accent discriminated. “We’ve talked you too—but of course we talk to every one.” She had a pause through which there glimmered a ray from luminous hours, the inner intimacy which, privileged as he was, he couldn’t pretend to share; then she broke out almost impatiently: “We’re looking after her—leave her to US!”

His envy of this nearer approach to what so touched him than he could himself achieve was in his face, but he tried to throw it off. “I doubt if after all you’re good for her.”

But Mrs. Brookenham knew. “She’s just the sort of person we ARE good for, and the thing for her is to be with us as much as possible—just live with us naturally and easily, listen to our talk, feel our confidence in her, be kept up, don’t you know? by the sense of what we expect of her splendid type, and so, little by little, let our influence act. What I meant to say just now is that I do perfectly see her taking what you call presents.”

“Well then,” Mr. Cashmore enquired, “what do you want more?”

Mrs. Brook hung fire an instant—she seemed on the point of telling him. “I DON’T see her, as I said, recognising the obligation.”

“The obligation—?”

“To give anything back. Anything at all.” Mrs. Brook was positive. “The comprehension of petty calculations? Never!”

“I don’t say the calculations are petty,” Mr. Cashmore objected.

“Well, she’s a great creature. If she does fall—!” His hostess lost herself in the view, which was at last all before her. “Be sure we shall all know it.”

“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of!”

“Then don’t be afraid till we do. She would fall, as it were, on US, don’t you see? and,” said Mrs. Brook, with decision this time in her headshake, “that couldn’t be. We MUST keep her up—that’s your guarantee. It’s rather too much,” she added with the same increase of briskness, “to have to keep YOU up too. Be very sure that if Carrie really wavers—”

“Carrie?”

His interruption was clearly too vague to be sincere, and it was as such that, going straight on, she treated it. “I shall never again give her three minutes’ attention. To answer to you for Fanny without being able—”

“To answer to Fanny for me, do you mean?” He had flushed quickly as if he awaited her there. “It wouldn’t suit you, you contend? Well then, I hope it will ease you off,” he went on with spirit, “to know that I wholly LOATHE Mrs. Donner.”

Mrs. Brook, staring, met the announcement with an absolute change of colour. “And since when, pray?” It was as if a fabric had crumbled. “She was here but the other day, and as full of you, poor thing, as an egg of meat.”

Mr. Cashmore could only blush for her. “I don’t say she wasn’t. My life’s a burden from her.”

Nothing, for a spectator, could have been so odd as Mrs. Brook’s disappointment unless it had been her determination. “Have you done with her already?”

“One has never done with a buzzing insect—!”

“Until one has literally killed it?” Mrs. Brookenham wailed. “I can’t take that from you, my dear man: it was yourself who originally distilled the poison that courses through her veins.” He jumped up at this as if he couldn’t bear it, presenting as he walked across the room, however, a large foolish fugitive back on which her eyes rested as on a proof of her penetration. “If you spoil everything by trying to deceive me, how can I help you?”

He had looked, in his restlessness, at a picture or two, but he finally turned round. “With whom is it you talk us over? With Petherton and his friend Mitchy? With your adored Vanderbank? With your awful Duchess?”

“You know my little circle, and you’ve not always despised it.” She met him on his return with a figure that had visibly flashed out for her. “Don’t foul your own nest! Remember that after all we’ve more or less produced you.” She had a smile that attenuated a little her image, for there were things that on a second thought he appeared ready to take from her. She patted the sofa as if to invite him again to be seated, and though he still stood before her it was with a face that seemed to show how her touch went home. “You know I’ve never quite thought you do us full honour, but it was because SHE took you for one of us that Carrie first—”

At this, to stop her, he dropped straight into the seat. “I assure you there has really been nothing.” With a continuation of his fidget he pulled out his watch. “Won’t she come in at all?”

“Do you mean Nanda?”

“Talk me over with HER!” he smiled, “if you like. If you don’t believe Mrs. Donner is dust and ashes to me,” he continued, “you do little justice to your daughter.”

“Do you wish to break it to me that you’re in love with Nanda?”

He hesitated, but only as if to give weight to his reply. “Awfully. I can’t tell you how I like her.”

She wondered. “And pray how will THAT help me? Help me, I mean, to help you. Is it what I’m to tell your wife?”

He sat looking away, but he evidently had his idea, which he at last produced. “Why wouldn’t it be just the thing? It would exactly prove my purity.”

There might have been in her momentary silence a hint of acceptance of it as a practical contribution to their problem, and there were indeed several lights in which it could be considered. Mrs. Brook, on a quick survey, selected the ironic. “I see, I see. I might by the same law arrange somehow that Lady Fanny should find herself in love with Edward. That would ‘prove’ HER purity. And you could be quite at ease,” she laughed—“he wouldn’t make any presents!”

Mr. Cashmore regarded her with a candour that was almost a reproach to her mirth. “I like your daughter better than I like you.”

But it only amused her more. “Is that perhaps because I don’t prove your purity?”

What he might have replied remained in the air, for the door opened so exactly at the moment she spoke that he rose again with a start and the butler, coming in, received her enquiry full in the face. This functionary’s answer to it, however, had no more than the usual austerity. “Mr. Vanderbank and Mr. Longdon.”

These visitors took a minute to appear, and Mrs. Brook, not stirring—still only looking from the sofa calmly up at Mr. Cashmore—used the time, it might have seemed, for correcting any impression of undue levity made by her recent question. “Where did you last meet Nanda?”

He glanced at the door to see if he were heard. “At the Grendons’.”

“So you do go there?”

“I went over from Hicks the other day for an hour.”

“And Carrie was there?”

“Yes. It was a dreadful horrid bore. But I talked only to your daughter.”

She got up—the others were at hand—and offered Mr. Cashmore an expression that might have struck him as strange. “It’s serious.”

“Serious?”—he had no eyes for the others.

“She didn’t tell me.”

He gave a sound, controlled by discretion, which sufficed none the less to make Mr. Longdon—beholding him for the first time—receive it with a little of the stiffness of a person greeted with a guffaw. Mr. Cashmore visibly liked this silence of Nanda’s about their meeting.

II

Mrs. Brookenham, who had introduced him to the elder of her visitors, had also found in serving these gentlemen with tea, a chance to edge at him with an intensity not to be resisted: “Talk to Mr. Longdon—take him off THERE.” She had indicated the sofa at the opposite end of the room and had set him an example by possessing herself, in the place she already occupied, of her “adored” Vanderbank. This arrangement, however, constituted for her, in her own corner, as soon as she had made it, the ground of an appeal. “Will he hate me any worse for doing that?”

Vanderbank glanced at the others. “Will Cashmore, do you mean?”

“Dear no—I don’t care whom HE hates. But with Mr. Longdon I want to avoid mistakes.”

“Then don’t try quite so hard!” Vanderbank laughed. “Is that your reason for throwing him into Cashmore’s arms?”

“Yes, precisely—so that I shall have these few moments to ask you for directions: you must know him by this time so well. I only want, heaven help me, to be as nice to him as I possibly can.”

“That’s quite the best thing for you and altogether why, this afternoon, I brought him: he might have better luck in finding you—it was he who suggested it—than he has had by himself. I’m in a general way,” Vanderbank added, “watching over him.”

“I see—and he’s watching over you.” Mrs. Brook’s sweet vacancy had already taken in so much. “He wants to judge of what I may be doing to you—he wants to save you from me. He quite detests me.”

Vanderbank, with the interest as well as the amusement, fairly threw himself back. “There’s nobody like you—you’re too magnificent!”

“I AM; and that I can look the truth in the face and not be angry or silly about it is, as you know, the one thing in the world for which I think a bit well of myself.”

“Oh yes, I know—I know; you’re too wonderful!”

Mrs. Brookenham, in a brief pause, completed her covert consciousness. “They’re doing beautifully—he’s taking Cashmore with a seriousness!”

“And with what is Cashmore taking him?”

“With the hope that from one moment to another Nanda may come in.”

“But how on earth does that concern him?”

“Through an extraordinary fancy he has suddenly taken to her.” Mrs. Brook had been swift to master the facts. “He has been meeting her at Tishy’s, and she has talked to him so effectually about his behaviour that she has quite made him cease to care for Carrie. He prefers HER now—and of course she’s much nicer.”

Vanderbank’s attention, it was clear, had now been fully seized. “She’s much nicer. Rather! What you mean is,” he asked the next moment, “that Nanda, this afternoon, has been the object of his call?”

“Yes—really; though he tried to keep it from me. She makes him feel,” she went on, “so innocent and good.”

Her companion for a moment said nothing; but then at last: “And WILL she come in?”

“I haven’t the least idea.”

“Don’t you know where she is?”

“I suppose she’s with Tishy, who has returned to town.”

Vanderbank turned this over. “Is that your system now—to ask no questions?”

“Why SHOULD I ask any—when I want her life to be as much as possible like my own? It’s simply that the hour has struck, as you know. From the moment she IS down the only thing for us is to live as friends. I think it’s so vulgar,” Mrs. Brook sighed, “not to have the same good manners with one’s children as one has with other people. She asks ME nothing.”

“Nothing?” Vanderbank echoed.

“Nothing.”

He paused again; after which, “It’s very disgusting!” he declared. Then while she took it up as he had taken her word of a moment before, “It’s very preposterous,” he continued.

Mrs. Brook appeared at a loss. “Do you mean her helping him?”

“It’s not of Nanda I’m speaking—it’s of him.” Vanderbank spoke with a certain impatience. “His being with her in any sort of direct relation at all. His mixing her up with his other beastly affairs.”

Mrs. Brook looked intelligent and wan about it, but also perfectly good-humoured. “My dear man, he and his affairs ARE such twaddle!”

Vanderbank laughed in spite of himself. “And does that make it any better?”

Mrs. Brook thought, but presently had a light—she almost smiled with it. “For US!” Then more woefully, “Don’t you want Carrie to be saved?” she asked.

“Why should I? Not a jot. Carrie be hanged!”

“But it’s for Fanny,” Mrs. Brook protested. “If Carrie IS rescued it’s a pretext the less for Fanny.” As the young man looked for an instant rather gloomily vague she softly quavered: “I suppose you don’t positively WANT Fanny to bolt?”

“To bolt?”

“Surely I’ve not to remind you at this time of day how Captain Dent-Douglas is always round the corner with the post-chaise, and how tight, on our side, we’re all clutching her.”

“But why not let her go?”

Mrs. Brook, at this, showed real resentment. “‘Go’? Then what would become of us?” She recalled his wandering fancy. “She’s the delight of our life.”

“Oh!” Vanderbank sceptically murmured.

“She’s the ornament of our circle,” his companion insisted. “She will, she won’t—she won’t, she will! It’s the excitement, every day, of plucking the daisy over.” Vanderbank’s attention, as she spoke, had attached itself across the room to Mr. Longdon; it gave her thus an image of the way his imagination had just seemed to her to stray, and she saw a reason in it moreover for her coming up in another place.

“Isn’t he rather rich?” She allowed the question all its effect of abruptness.

Vanderbank looked round at her. “Mr. Longdon? I haven’t the least idea.”

“Not after becoming so intimate? It’s usually, with people, the very first thing I get my impression of.” There came into her face for another glance at their friend no crudity of curiosity, but an expression more tenderly wistful. “He must have some mysterious box under his bed.”

“Down in Suffolk?—a miser’s hoard? Who knows? I dare say,” Vanderbank went on. “He isn’t a miser, but he strikes me as careful.”

Mrs. Brook meanwhile had thought it out. “Then he has something to be careful of; it would take something really handsome to inspire in a man like him that sort of interest. With his small expenses all these years his savings must be immense. And how could he have proposed to mamma unless he had originally had money?”

If Vanderbank a little helplessly wondered he also laughed. “You must remember your mother refused him.”

“Ah but not because there wasn’t enough.”

“No—I imagine the force of the blow for him was just in the other reason.”

“Well, it would have been in that one just as much if that one had been the other.” Mrs. Brook was sagacious, though a trifle obscure, and she pursued the next moment: “Mamma was so sincere. The fortune was nothing to her. That shows it was immense.”

“It couldn’t have been as great as your logic,” Vanderbank smiled; “but of course if it has been growing ever since—!”

“I can see it grow while he sits there,” Mrs. Brook declared. But her logic had in fact its own law, and her next transition was an equal jump. “It was too lovely, the frankness of your admission a minute ago that I affect him uncannily. Ah don’t spoil it by explanations!” she beautifully pleaded: “he’s not the first and he won’t be the last with whom I shall not have been what they call a combination. The only thing that matters is that I mustn’t, if possible, make the case worse. So you must guide me. What IS one to do?”

Vanderbank, now amused again, looked at her kindly. “Be yourself, my dear woman. Obey your fine instincts.”

“How can you be,” she sweetly asked, “so hideously hypocritical? You know as well as you sit there that my fine instincts are the thing in the world you’re most in terror of. ‘Be myself?’” she echoed. “What you’d LIKE to say is: ‘Be somebody else—that’s your only chance.’ Well, I’ll try—I’ll try.”

He laughed again, shaking his head. “Don’t—don’t.”

“You mean it’s too hopeless? There’s no way of effacing the bad impression or of starting a good one?” On this, with a drop of his mirth, he met her eyes, and for an instant, through the superficial levity of their talk, they might have appeared to sound each other. It lasted till Mrs. Brook went on: “I should really like not to lose him.”

Vanderbank seemed to understand and at last said: “I think you won’t lose him.”

“Do you mean you’ll help me, Van, you WILL?” Her voice had at moments the most touching tones of any in England, and humble, helpless, affectionate, she spoke with a familiarity of friendship. “It’s for the sense of the link with mamma,” she explained. “He’s simply full of her.”

“Oh I know. He’s prodigious.”

“He has told you more—he comes back to it?” Mrs. Brook eagerly asked.

“Well,” the young man replied a trifle evasively, “we’ve had a great deal of talk, and he’s the jolliest old boy possible, and in short I like him.”

“I see,” said Mrs. Brook blandly, “and he likes you in return as much as he despises me. That makes it all right—makes me somehow so happy for you. There’s something in him—what is it?—that suggests the oncle d’Amerique, the eccentric benefactor, the fairy godmother. He’s a little of an old woman—but all the better for it.” She hung fire but an instant before she pursued: “What can we make him do for you?”

Vanderbank at this was very blank. “Do for me?”

“How can any one love you,” she asked, “without wanting to show it in some way? You know all the ways, dear Van,” she breathed, “in which I want to show it.”

He might have known them, something suddenly fixed in his face appeared to say, but they were not what was, on this speech of hers, most immediately present to him. “That for instance is the tone not to take with him.”

“There you are!” she sighed with discouragement. “Well, only TELL me.” Then as he said nothing: “I must be more like mamma?”

His expression confessed to his feeling an awkwardness. “You’re perhaps not quite enough like her.”

“Oh I know that if he deplores me as I am now she would have done so quite as much; in fact probably, as seeing it nearer, a good deal more. She’d have despised me even more than he. But if it’s a question,” Mrs. Brook went on, “of not saying what mamma wouldn’t, how can I know, don’t you see, what she WOULD have said?” Mrs. Brook became as wonderful as if she saw in her friend’s face some admiring reflexion of the fine freedom of mind that—in such a connexion quite as much as in any other—she could always show. “Of course I revere mamma just as much as he does, and there was everything in her to revere. But she was none the less in every way a charming woman too, and I don’t know, after all, do I? what even she—in their peculiar relation—may not have said to him.”

Vanderbank’s laugh came back. “Very good—very good. I return to my first idea. Try with him whatever comes into your head. You’re a woman of genius after all, and genius mostly justifies itself. To make you right,” he went on pleasantly and inexorably, “might perhaps be to make you wrong. Since you HAVE so great a charm trust it not at all or all in all. That, I dare say, is all you can do. Therefore—yes—be yourself.”

These remarks were followed on either side by the repetition of a somewhat intenser mutual gaze, though indeed the speaker’s eyes had more the air of meeting his friend’s than of seeking them. “I can’t be YOU certainly, Van,” Mrs. Brook sadly brought forth.

“I know what you mean by that,” he rejoined in a moment. “You mean I’m hypocritical.”

“Hypocritical?”

“I’m diplomatic and calculating—I don’t show him how bad I am; whereas with you he knows the worst.”

Of this observation Mrs. Brook, whose eyes attached themselves again to Mr. Longdon, took at first no further notice than might have been indicated by the way it set her musing.

“‘Calculating’?”—she at last took him up. “On what is there to calculate?”

“Why,” said Vanderbank, “if, as you just hinted, he’s a blessing in disguise—! I perfectly admit,” he resumed, “that I’m capable of sacrifices to keep on good terms with him.”

“You’re not afraid he’ll bore you?”

“Oh yes—distinctly.”

“But he’ll be worth it? Then,” Mrs. Brook said as he appeared to assent, “he’ll be worth a great deal.” She continued to watch Mr. Longdon, who, without his glasses, stared straight at the floor while Mr. Cashmore talked to him. She pursued, however, dispassionately enough: “He must be of a narrowness—!”

“Oh beautiful!”

She was silent again. “I shall broaden him. YOU won’t.”

“Heaven forbid!” Vanderbank heartily concurred. “But none the less, as I’ve said, I’ll help you.”

Her attention was still fixed. “It will be him you’ll help. If you’re to make sacrifices to keep on good terms with him the first sacrifice will be of me.” Then on his leaving this remark so long unanswered that she had finally looked at him again: “I’m perfectly prepared for it.”

It was as if, jocosely enough, he had had time to make up his mind how to meet her. “What will you have—when he loved my mother?”

Nothing could have been droller than the gloom of her surprise. “Yours too?”

“I didn’t tell you the other day—out of delicacy.”

Mrs. Brookenham darkly thought. “HE didn’t tell me either.”

“The same consideration deterred him. But if I didn’t speak of it,” Vanderbank continued, “when I arranged with you, after meeting him here at dinner, that you should come to tea with him at my rooms—if I didn’t mention it then it wasn’t because I hadn’t learnt it early.”

Mrs. Brook more deeply sounded this affair, but she spoke with the exaggerated mildness that was the form mostly taken by her gaiety. “It was because of course it makes him out such a wretch! What becomes in that case of his loyalty?”

“To YOUR mother’s memory? Oh it’s all right—he has it quite straight. She came later. Mine, after my father’s death, had refused him. But you see he might have been my stepfather.”

Mrs. Brookenham took it in, but she had suddenly a brighter light. “He might have been my OWN father! Besides,” she went on, “if his line is to love the mothers why on earth doesn’t he love ME? I’m in all conscience enough of one.”

“Ah but isn’t there in your case the fact of a daughter?” Vanderbank asked with a slight embarrassment.

Mrs. Brookenham stared. “What good does that do me?”

“Why, didn’t she tell you?”

“Nanda? She told me he doesn’t like her any better than he likes me.”

Vanderbank in his turn showed surprise. “That’s really what she said?”

“She had on her return from your rooms a most unusual fit of frankness, for she generally tells me nothing.”

“Well,” said Vanderbank, “how did she put it?”

Mrs. Brook reflected—recovered it. “‘I like him awfully, but I am not in the least HIS idea.’”

“His idea of what?”

“That’s just what I asked her. Of the proper grandchild for mamma.”

Vanderbank hesitated. “Well, she isn’t.” Then after another pause: “But she’ll do.”

His companion gave him a deep look. “You’ll make her?”

He got up, and on seeing him move Mr. Longdon also rose, so that, facing each other across the room, they exchanged a friendly signal or two. “I’ll make her.”

III

Their hostess’s account of Mr. Cashmore’s motive for his staying on was so far justified as that Vanderbank, while Mr. Longdon came over to Mrs. Brook, appeared without difficulty further to engage him. The lady in question meanwhile had drawn her old friend down, and her present method of approach would have interested an observer aware of the unhappy conviction she had just privately expressed. Some trace indeed of the glimpse of it enjoyed by Mr. Cashmere’s present interlocutor might have been detected in the restlessness that Vanderbank’s desire to keep the other pair uninterrupted was still not able to banish from his attitude. Not, however, that Mrs. Brook took the smallest account of it as she quickly broke out: “How can we thank you enough, my dear man, for your extraordinary kindness?” The reference was vivid, yet Mr. Longdon looked so blank about it that she had immediately to explain. “I mean to dear Van, who has told us of your giving him the great happiness—unless he’s too dreadfully mistaken—of letting him really know you. He’s such a tremendous friend of ours that nothing so delightful can befall him without its affecting us in the same way.” She had proceeded with confidence, but suddenly she pulled up. “Don’t tell me he IS mistaken—I shouldn’t be able to bear it.” She challenged the pale old man with a loveliness that was for the moment absolutely juvenile. “Aren’t you letting him—really?”

Mr. Longdon’s smile was queer. “I can’t prevent him. I’m not a great house—to give orders to go over me. The kindness is Mr. Vanderbank’s own, and I’ve taken up, I’m afraid, a great deal of his precious time.”

“You have indeed.” Mrs. Brook was undiscouraged. “He has been talking with me just now of nothing else. You may say,” she went on, “that it’s I who have kept him at it. So I have, for his pleasure’s a joy to us. If you can’t prevent what he feels, you know, you can’t prevent either what WE feel.”

Mr. Longdon’s face reflected for a minute something he could scarcely have supposed her acute enough to make out, the struggle between his real mistrust of her, founded on the unconscious violence offered by her nature to his every memory of her mother, and his sense on the other hand of the high propriety of his liking her; to which latter force his interest in Vanderbank was a contribution, inasmuch as he was obliged to recognise on the part of the pair an alliance it would have been difficult to explain at Beccles. “Perhaps I don’t quite see the value of what your husband and you and I are in a position to do for him.”

“Do you mean because he’s himself so clever?”

“Well,” said Mr. Longdon, “I dare say that’s at the bottom of my feeling so proud to be taken up by him. I think of the young men of MY time and see that he takes in more. But that’s what you all do,” he rather helplessly sighed. “You’re very, very wonderful!”

She met him with an almost extravagant eagerness that the meeting should be just where he wished. “I don’t take in everything, but I take in all I can. That’s a great affair in London to-day, and I often feel as if I were a circus-woman, in pink tights and no particular skirts, riding half a dozen horses at once. We’re all in the troupe now, I suppose,” she smiled, “and we must travel with the show. But when you say we’re different,” she added, “think, after all, of mamma.”

Mr. Longdon stared. “It’s from her you ARE different.”

“Ah but she had an awfully fine mind. We’re not cleverer than she.”

His conscious honest eyes looked away an instant. “It’s perhaps enough for the present that you’re cleverer than I! I was very glad the other day,” he continued, “to make the acquaintance of your daughter. I hoped I should find her with you.”

If Mrs. Brook cast about it was but for a few seconds. “If she had known you were coming she would certainly have been here. She wanted so to please you.” Then as her visitor took no further notice of this speech than to ask if Nanda were out of the house she had to admit it as an aggravation of failure; but she pursued in the next breath: “Of course you won’t care, but she raves about you.”

He appeared indeed at first not to care. “Isn’t she eighteen?”—it was oddly abrupt.

“I have to think. Wouldn’t it be nearer twenty?” Mrs. Brook audaciously returned. She tried again. “She told me all about your interview. I stayed away on purpose—I had my idea.”

“And what WAS your idea?”

“I thought she’d remind you more of mamma if I wasn’t there. But she’s a little person who sees. Perhaps you didn’t think it, but she knew.”

“And what did she know?” asked Mr. Longdon, who was unable, however, to keep from his tone a certain coldness which really deprived the question of its proper curiosity.

Mrs. Brook just showed the chill of it, but she had always her courage. “Why that you don’t like her.” She had the courage of carrying off as well as of backing out. “She too has her little place with the circus—it’s the way we earn our living.”

Mr. Longdon said nothing for a moment and when he at last spoke it was almost with an air of contradiction. “She’s your mother to the life.”

His hostess, for three seconds, looked at him hard. “Ah but with such differences! You’ll lose it,” she added with a headshake of pity.

He had his eyes only on Vanderbank. “Well, my losses are my own affair.” Then his face came back. “Did she tell you I didn’t like her?”

The indulgence in Mrs. Brook’s view of his simplicity was marked. “You thought you succeeded so in hiding it? No matter—she bears up. I think she really feels a great deal as I do—that it’s no matter how many of us you hate if you’ll only go on feeling as you do about mamma. Show us THAT—that’s what we want.”

Nothing could have expressed more the balm of reassurance, but the mild drops had fallen short of the spot to which they were directed. “‘Show’ you?”

Oh how he had sounded the word! “I see—you DON’T show. That’s just what Nanda saw you thought! But you can’t keep us from knowing it—can’t keep it in fact, I think, from affecting your own behaviour. You’d be much worse to us if it wasn’t for the still warm ashes of your old passion.” It was an immense pity for Vanderbank’s amusement that he was at this moment too far off to fit to the expression of his old friend’s face so much of the cause of it as had sprung from the deeply informed tone of Mrs. Brook’s allusion. To what degree the speaker herself made the connexion will never be known to history, nor whether as she went on she thought she bettered her case or she simply lost her head. “The great thing for us is that we can never be for you quite like other ordinary people.”

“And what’s the great thing for ME?”

“Oh for you, there’s nothing, I’m afraid, but small things—so small that they can scarcely be worth the trouble of your making them out. Our being so happy that you’ve come back to us—if only just for a glimpse and to leave us again, in no matter what horror, for ever; our positive delight in your being exactly so different; the pleasure we have in talking about you, and shall still have—or indeed all the more—even if we’ve seen you only to lose you: whatever all this represents for ourselves it’s for none of us to pretend to say how much or how little YOU may pick out of it. And yet,” Mrs. Brook wandered on, “however much we may disappoint you some little spark of the past can’t help being in us—for the past is the one thing beyond all spoiling: there it is, don’t you think?—to speak for itself and, if need be, only OF itself.” She pulled up, but she appeared to have destroyed all power of speech in him, so that while she waited she had time for a fresh inspiration. It might perhaps frankly have been mentioned as on the whole her finest. “Don’t you think it possible that if you once get the point of view of realising that I KNOW—?”

She held the note so long that he at last supplied a sound. “That you know what?”

“Why that compared with her I’m a poor creeping thing. I mean”—she hastened to forestall any protest of mere decency that would spoil her idea—“that of course I ache in every limb with the certainty of my dreadful difference. It isn’t as if I DIDN’T know it, don’t you see? There it is as a matter of course: I’ve helplessly but finally and completely accepted it. Won’t THAT help you?” she so ingeniously pleaded. “It isn’t as if I tormented you with any recall of her whatever. I can quite see how awful it would be for you if, with the effect I produce on you, I did have her lovely eyes or her distinguished nose or the shape of her forehead or the colour of her hair. Strange as it is in a daughter I’m disconnected altogether, and don’t you think I MAY be a little saved for you by becoming thus simply out of the question? Of course,” she continued, “your real trial is poor Nanda—she’s likewise so fearfully out of it and yet she’s so fearfully in it. And she,” said Mrs. Brook for a climax—“SHE doesn’t know!”

A strange faint flush, while she talked, had come into Mr. Longdon’s face, and, whatever effect, as she put it, she produced on him, it was clearly not that of causing his attention to wander. She held him at least for weal or woe; his bright eyes grew brighter and opened into a stare that finally seemed to offer him as submerged in mere wonder. At last, however, he rose to the surface, and he appeared to have lighted at the bottom of the sea on the pearl of the particular wisdom he needed. “I dare say there may be something in what you so extraordinarily suggest.”

She jumped at it as if in pleasant pain. “In just letting me go—?”

But at this he dropped. “I shall never let you go.”

It renewed her fear. “Not just for what I AM?”

He rose from his place beside her, but looking away from her and with his colour marked. “I shall never let you go,” he repeated.

“Oh you angel!” She sprang up more quickly and the others were by this time on their feet. “I’ve done it, I’ve done it!” she joyously cried to Vanderbank; “he likes me, or at least he can bear me—I’ve found him the way; and now I don’t care even if he SAYS I haven’t.” Then she turned again to her old friend. “We can manage about Nanda—you needn’t ever see her. She’s ‘down’ now, but she can go up again. We can arrange it at any rate—c’est la moindre des choses.”

“Upon my honour I protest,” Mr. Cashmore exclaimed, “against anything of the sort! I defy you to ‘arrange’ that young lady in any such manner without also arranging ME. I’m one of her greatest admirers,” he gaily announced to Mr. Longdon.

Vanderbank said nothing, and Mr. Longdon seemed to show he would have preferred to do the same: that visitor’s eyes might have represented an appeal to him somehow to intervene, to show the due acquaintance, springing from practice and wanting in himself, with the art of conversation developed to the point at which it could thus sustain a lady in the upper air. Vanderbank’s silence might, without his mere kind pacific look, have seemed almost inhuman. Poor Mr. Longdon had finally to do his own simple best. “Will you bring your daughter to see me?” he asked of Mrs. Brookenham.

“Oh, oh—that’s an idea: will you bring her to see ME?” Mr. Cashmore again broke out.

Mrs. Brook had only fixed Mr. Longdon with the air of unutterable things. “You angel, you angel!”—they found expression but in that.

“I don’t need to ask you to bring her, do I?” Vanderbank now said to his hostess. “I hope you don’t mind my bragging all over the place of the great honour she did me the other day in appearing quite by herself.”

“Quite by herself? I say, Mrs. Brook!” Mr. Cashmore flourished on.

It was only now that she noticed him; which she did indeed but by answering Vanderbank. “She didn’t go for YOU I’m afraid—though of course she might: she went because you had promised her Mr. Longdon. But I should have no more feeling about her going to you—and should expect her to have no more—than about her taking a pound of tea, as she sometimes does, to her old nurse, or her going to read to the old women at the workhouse. May you never have less to brag of!”

“I wish she’d bring ME a pound of tea!” Mr. Cashmore resumed. “Or ain’t I enough of an old woman for her to come and read to me at home?”

“Does she habitually visit the workhouse?” Mr. Longdon enquired of Mrs. Brook.

This lady kept him in a moment’s suspense, which another contemplation might moreover have detected that Vanderbank in some degree shared. “Every Friday at three.”

Vanderbank, with a sudden turn, moved straight to one of the windows, and Mr. Cashmore had a happy remembrance. “Why, this is Friday—she must have gone to-day. But does she stay so late?”

“She was to go afterwards to little Aggie: I’m trying so, in spite of difficulties,” Mrs. Brook explained, “to keep them on together.” She addressed herself with a new thought to Mr. Longdon. “You must know little Aggie—the niece of the Duchess: I forget if you’ve met the Duchess, but you must know HER too—there are so many things on which I’m sure she’ll feel with you. Little Aggie’s the one,” she continued; “you’ll delight in her; SHE ought to have been mamma’s grandchild.”

“Dearest lady, how can you pretend or for a moment compare her—?” Mr. Cashmore broke in. “She says nothing to me at all.”

“She says nothing to any one,” Mrs. Brook serenely replied; “that’s just her type and her charm—just above all her education.” Then she appealed to Vanderbank. “Won’t Mr. Longdon be struck with little Aggie and won’t he find it interesting to talk about all that sort of thing with the Duchess?”

Vanderbank came back laughing, but Mr. Longdon anticipated his reply. “What sort of thing do you mean?”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Brook, “the whole question, don’t you know? of bringing girls forward or not. The question of—well, what do you call it?—their exposure. It’s THE question, it appears—the question—of the future; it’s awfully interesting and the Duchess at any rate is great on it. Nanda of course is exposed,” Mrs. Brook pursued—“fearfully.”

“And what on earth is she exposed to?” Mr. Cashmore gaily demanded.

“She’s exposed to YOU, it would seem, my dear fellow!” Vanderbank spoke with a certain discernible impatience not so much of the fact he mentioned as of the turn of their talk.

It might have been in almost compassionate deprecation of this weak note that Mrs. Brookenham looked at him. Her own reply to Mr. Cashmere’s question, however, was uttered at Mr. Longdon. “She’s exposed—it’s much worse—to ME. But Aggie isn’t exposed to anything—never has been and never is to be; and we’re watching to see if the Duchess can carry it through.”

“Why not,” asked Mr. Cashmore, “if there’s nothing she CAN be exposed to but the Duchess herself?”

He had appealed to his companions impartially, but Mr. Longdon, whose attention was now all for his hostess, appeared unconscious. “If you’re all watching is it your idea that I should watch WITH you?”

The enquiry, on his lips, was a waft of cold air, the sense of which clearly led Mrs. Brook to put her invitation on the right ground. “Not of course on the chance of anything’s happening to the dear child—to whom nothing obviously CAN happen but that her aunt will marry her off in the shortest possible time and in the best possible conditions. No, the interest is much more in the way the Duchess herself steers.”

“Ah, she’s in a boat,” Mr. Cashmore fully concurred, “that will take a good bit of that.”

It is not for Mr. Longdon’s historian to overlook that if he was, not unnaturally, mystified he was yet also visibly interested. “What boat is she in?”

He had addressed his curiosity, with politeness, to Mr. Cashmore, but they were all arrested by the wonderful way in which Mrs. Brook managed to smile at once very dimly, very darkly, and yet make it take them all in. “I think YOU must tell him, Van.”

“Heaven forbid!”—and Van again retreated.

“I’LL tell him like a shot—if you really give me leave,” said Mr. Cashmore, for whom any scruple referred itself manifestly not to the subject of the information but to the presence of a lady.

“I DON’T give you leave and I beg you’ll hold your tongue,” Mrs. Brookenham returned. “You handle such matters with a minuteness—! In short,” she broke off to Mr. Longdon, “he would tell you a good deal more than you’ll care to know. She IS in a boat—but she’s an experienced mariner. Basta, as she would say. Do you know Mitchy?” Mrs. Brook suddenly asked.

“Oh yes, he knows Mitchy”—Vanderbank had approached again.

“Then make HIM tell him”—she put it before the young man as a charming turn for them all. “Mitchy CAN be refined when he tries.”

“Oh dear—when Mitchy ‘tries’!” Vanderbank laughed. “I think I should rather, for the job, offer him to Mr. Longdon abandoned to his native wild impulse.”

“I LIKE Mr. Mitchett,” the old man said, endeavouring to look his hostess straight in the eye and speaking as if somewhat to defy her to convict him, even from the point of view of Beccles, of a mistake.

Mrs. Brookenham took it with a wonderful bright emotion. “My dear friend, vous me rendez la vie! If you can stand Mitchy you can stand any of us!”

“Upon my honour I should think so!” Mr. Cashmore was eager to remark. “What on earth do you mean,” he demanded of Mrs. Brook, “by saying that I’m more ‘minute’ than he?”

She turned her beauty an instant on this critic. “I don’t say you’re more minute—I say he’s more brilliant. Besides, as I’ve told you before, you’re not one of us.” With which, as a check to further discussion, she went straight on to Mr. Longdon: “The point about Aggie’s conservative education is the wonderful sincerity with which the Duchess feels that one’s girl may so perfectly and consistently be hedged in without one’s really ever (for it comes to that) depriving one’s own self—”

“Well, of what?” Mr. Longdon boldly demanded while his hostess appeared thoughtfully to falter.

She addressed herself mutely to Vanderbank, in whom the movement produced a laugh. “I defy you,” he exclaimed, “to say!”

“Well, you don’t defy ME!” Mr. Cashmore cried as Mrs. Brook failed to take up the challenge. “If you know Mitchy,” he went on to Mr. Longdon, “you must know Petherton.”

The elder man remained vague and not imperceptibly cold. “Petherton?”

“My brother-in-law—whom, God knows why, Mitchy runs.”

“Runs?” Mr. Longdon again echoed.

Mrs. Brook appealed afresh to Vanderbank. “I think we ought to spare him. I may not remind you of mamma,” she continued to their companion, “but I hope you don’t mind my saying how much you remind me. Explanations, after all, spoil things, and if you CAN make anything of us and will sometimes come back you’ll find everything in its native freshness. You’ll see, you’ll feel for yourself.”

Mr. Longdon stood before her and raised to Vanderbank, when she had ceased, the eyes he had attached to the carpet while she talked. “And must I go now?” Explanations, she had said, spoiled things, but he might have been a stranger at an Eastern court—comically helpless without his interpreter.

“If Mrs. Brook desires to ‘spare’ you,” Vanderbank kindly replied, “the best way to make sure of it would perhaps indeed be to remove you. But hadn’t we a hope of Nanda?”

“It might be of use for us to wait for her?”—it was still to his young friend that Mr. Longdon put it.

“Ah when she’s once on the loose—!” Mrs. Brookenham sighed.

“Unless la voila,” she said as a hand was heard at the door-latch. It was only, however, a footman who entered with a little tray that, on his approaching his mistress, offered to sight the brown envelope of a telegram. She immediately took leave to open this missive, after the quick perusal of which she had another vision of them all. “It IS she—the modern daughter. ‘Tishy keeps me dinner and opera; clothes all right; return uncertain, but if before morning have latch-key.’ She won’t come home till morning!” said Mrs. Brook.

“But think of the comfort of the latch-key!” Vanderbank laughed. “You might go to the opera,” he said to Mr. Longdon.

“Hanged if I don’t!” Mr. Cashmore exclaimed.

Mr. Longdon appeared to have caught from Nanda’s message an obscure agitation; he met his young friend’s suggestion at all events with a visible intensity. “Will you go with me?”

Vanderbank had just debated, recalling engagements; which gave Mrs. Brook time to intervene. “Can’t you live without him?” she asked of her elder friend.

Vanderbank had looked at her an instant. “I think I can get there late,” he then replied to Mr. Longdon.

“I think I can get there early,” Mr. Cashmore declared. “Mrs. Grendon must have a box; in fact I know which, and THEY don’t,” he jocosely continued to his hostess.

Mrs. Brook meanwhile had given Mr. Longdon her hand. “Well, in any case the child SHALL soon come to you. And oh alone,” she insisted: “you needn’t make phrases—I know too well what I’m about.”

“One hopes really you do,” pursued the unquenched Mr. Cashmore.

“If that’s what one gets by having known your mother—!”

“It wouldn’t have helped YOU” Mrs. Brook retorted. “And won’t you have to say it’s ALL you were to get?” she pityingly murmured to her other visitor.

He turned to Vanderbank with a strange gasp, and that comforter said “Come!”

one but talk to ME about her? From the moment you first spoke to me—‘monstrously,’ I remember you called it—of the difference made in your social life by her finally established, her perpetual, her inexorable participation: from that moment what have we both done but put our heads together over the question of keeping the place tidy, as you called it—or as I called it, was it?—for the young female mind?”

Mrs. Brook faced serenely enough the directness of this challenge. “Well, what are you coming to? I spoke of the change in my life of course; I happen to be so constituted that my life has something to do with my mind and my mind something to do with my talk. Good talk: you know—no one, dear Van, should know better—what part for me that plays. Therefore when one has deliberately to make one’s talk bad—!”

“‘Bad’?” Vanderbank, in his amusement, fell back in his chair. “Dear Mrs. Brook, you’re too delightful!”

“You know what I mean—stupid, flat, fourth-rate. When one has to haul in sail to that degree—and for a perfectly outside reason—there’s nothing strange in one’s taking a friend sometimes into the confidence of one’s irritation.”

“Ah,” Vanderbank protested, “you do yourself injustice. Irritation hasn’t been for you the only consequence of the affair.”

Mrs. Brook gloomily thought. “No, no—I’ve had my calmness: the calmness of deep despair. I’ve seemed to see everything go.”

“Oh how can you say that,” her visitor demanded, “when just what we’ve most been agreed upon so often is the practical impossibility of making any change? Hasn’t it seemed as if we really can’t overcome conversational habits so thoroughly formed?”

Again Mrs. Brook reflected. “As if our way of looking at things were too serious to be trifled with? I don’t know—I think it’s only you who have denied our sacrifices, our compromises and concessions. I myself have constantly felt smothered in them. But there it is,” she impatiently went on. “What I don’t admit is that you’ve given me ground to take for a proof of your ‘intentions’—to use the odious term—your association with me on behalf of the preposterous fiction, as it after all is, of Nanda’s blankness of mind.”

Vanderbank’s head, in his chair, was thrown back; his eyes ranged over the top of the room. “There never has been any mystery about my thinking her—all in her own way—the nicest girl in London. She IS.”

His companion was silent a little. “She is, by all means. Well,” she then added, “so far as I may have been alive to the fact of any one’s thinking her so, it’s not out of place I should mention to you the difference made in my appreciation of it by our delightful little stay at Mertle. My views for Nanda,” said Mrs. Brook, “have somehow gone up.”

Vanderbank was prompt to show how he could understand it. “So that you wouldn’t consider even Mitchy now?”

But his friend took no notice of the question. “The way Mr. Longdon distinguishes her is quite the sort of thing that gives a girl, as Harold says, a ‘leg up.’ It’s awfully curious and has made me think: he isn’t anything whatever, as London estimates go, in himself—so that what is it, pray, that makes him, when ‘added on’ to her, so double Nanda’s value? I somehow or other see, through his being known to back her and through the pretty story of his loyalty to mamma and all the rest of it (oh if one chose to WORK that!) ever so much more of a chance for her.”

Vanderbank’s eyes were on the ceiling. “It IS curious, isn’t it?—though I think he’s rather more ‘in himself,’ even for the London estimate, than you quite understand.” He appeared to give her time to take this up, but as she said nothing he pursued: “I dare say that if even I now WERE to enter myself it would strike you as too late.”

Her attention to this was but indirect. “It’s awfully vulgar to be talking about it, but I can’t help feeling that something possibly rather big will come of Mr. Longdon.”

“Ah we’ve touched on that before,” said Vanderbank, “and you know you did think something might come even for me.”

She continued however, as if she scarce heard him, to work out her own vision. “It’s very true that up to now—”

“Well, up to now?” he asked as she faltered.

She faltered still a little. “I do say the most hideous things. But we HAVE said worse, haven’t we? Up to now, I mean, he hasn’t given her anything. Unless indeed,” she mused, “she may have had something without telling me.”

Vanderbank went much straighter. “What sort of thing have you in mind? Are you thinking of money?”

“Yes. Isn’t it awful?”

“That you should think of it?”

“That I should talk this way.” Her friend was apparently not prepared with an assent, and she quickly enough pursued: “If he HAD given her any it would come out somehow in her expenditure. She has tremendous liberty and is very secretive, but still it would come out.”

“He wouldn’t give her any without letting you know. Nor would she, without doing so,” Vanderbank added, “take it.”

“Ah,” Mrs. Brook quietly said, “she hates me enough for anything.”

“That’s only your romantic theory.”

Once more she appeared not to hear him; she gave the discussion another turn. “Has he given YOU anything?”

Her visitor smiled. “Not so much as a cigarette. I’ve always my pockets full of them, and HE never: so he only takes mine. Oh Mrs. Brook,” he continued, “with me too—though I’ve also tremendous liberty!—it would come out.”

“I think you’d let me know,” she returned.

“Yes, I’d let you know.”

Silence, upon this, fell between them a little; which she was the first to break. “She has gone with him this afternoon—by solemn appointment—to the South Kensington Museum.”

There was something in Mrs. Brook’s dolorous drop that yet presented the news as a portent so great that he was moved again to mirth. “Ah that’s where she is? Then I confess she has scored. He has never taken ME to the South Kensington Museum.”

“You were asking what we’re going to do,” she went on. “What I meant was—about Baireuth—that the question for Nanda’s simplified. He has pressed her so to pay him a visit.”

Vanderbank’s assent was marked. “I see: so that if you do go abroad she’ll be provided for by that engagement.”

“And by lots of other invitations.”

These were such things as, for the most part, the young man could turn over. “Do you mean you’d let her go alone—?”

“To wherever she’s asked?” said Mrs. Brook. “Why not? Don’t talk like the Duchess.”

Vanderbank seemed for a moment to try not to. “Couldn’t Mr. Longdon take her? Why not?”

His friend looked really struck with it. “That WOULD be working him. But to a beautiful end!” she meditated. “The only thing would be to get him also asked.”

“Ah but there you are, don’t you see? Fancy ‘getting’ Mr. Longdon anything or anywhere whatever! Don’t you feel,” Vanderbank threw out, “how the impossibility of exerting that sort of patronage for him immediately places him?”

Mrs. Brook gave her companion one of those fitful glances of almost grateful appreciation with which their intercourse was even at its darkest hours frequently illumined. “As if he were the Primate or the French Ambassador? Yes, you’re right—one couldn’t do it; though it’s very odd and one doesn’t quite see why. It does place him. But he becomes thereby exactly the very sort of person with whom it would be most of an advantage for her to go about. What a pity,” Mrs. Brook sighed, “he doesn’t know more people!”

“Ah well, we ARE, in our way, bringing that to pass. Only we mustn’t rush it. Leave it to Nanda herself,” Vanderbank presently added; on which his companion so manifestly left it that she touched after a moment’s silence on quite a different matter. “I dare say he’d tell YOU—wouldn’t he?—if he were to give her any considerable sum.”

She had only obeyed his injunction, but he stared at the length of her jump. “He might attempt to do so, but I shouldn’t at all like it.” He was moved immediately to dismiss this branch of the subject and, apparently to help himself, take up another. “Do you mean she understands he has asked her down for a regular long stay?”

Mrs. Brook barely hesitated. “She understands, I think, that what I expect of her is to make it as long as possible.”

Vanderbank laughed out—as it was even after ten years still possible to laugh—at the childlike innocence with which her voice could invest the hardest teachings of life; then with something a trifle nervous in the whole sound and manner he sprang up from his chair. “What a blessing he is to us all!”

“Yes, but think what we must be to HIM.”

“An immense interest, no doubt.” He took a few aimless steps and, stooping over a basket of flowers, inhaled it with violence, almost buried his face. “I dare say we ARE interesting.” He had spoken rather vaguely, but Mrs. Brook knew exactly why. “We render him no end of a service. We keep him in touch with old memories.”

Vanderbank had reached one of the windows, shaded from without by a great striped sun-blind beneath which and between the flower-pots of the balcony he could see a stretch of hot relaxed street. He looked a minute at these things. “I do so like your phrases!”

She had a pause that challenged his tone. “Do you call mamma a ‘phrase’?”

He went off again, quite with extravagance, but quickly, leaving the window, pulled himself up. “I dare say we MUST put things for him—he does it, cares or is able to do it, so little himself.”

“Precisely. He just quietly acts. That’s his nature, dear thing. We must LET him act.”

Vanderbank seemed to stifle again too vivid a sense of her particular emphasis. “Yes, yes—we must let him.”

“Though it won’t prevent Nanda, I imagine,” his hostess pursued, “from finding the fun of a whole month at Beccles—or whatever she puts in—not exactly fast and furious.”

Vanderbank had the look of measuring what the girl might “put in.” “The place will be quiet, of course, but when a person’s so fond of a person—!”

“As she is of him, you mean?”

He hesitated. “Yes. Then it’s all right.”

“She IS fond of him, thank God!” said Mrs. Brook.

He was before her now with the air of a man who had suddenly determined on a great blind leap. “Do you know what he has done? He wants me so to marry her that he has proposed a definite basis.”

Mrs. Brook got straight up. “‘Proposed’? To HER?”

“No, I don’t think he has said a word to Nanda—in fact I’m sure that, very properly, he doesn’t mean to. But he spoke to me on Sunday night at Mertle—I had a big talk with him there alone, very late, in the smoking-room.” Mrs. Brook’s stare was serious, and Vanderbank now went on as if the sound of his voice helped him to meet it. “We had things out very much and his kindness was extraordinary—he’s the most beautiful old boy that ever lived. I don’t know, now that I come to think of it, if I’m within my rights in telling you—and of course I shall immediately let him know that I HAVE told you; but I feel I can’t arrive at any respectable sort of attitude in the matter without taking you into my confidence. Which is really what I came here to-day to do, though till this moment I’ve funked it.”

It was either, as her friends chose to think it, an advantage or a drawback of intercourse with Mrs. Brook that, her face being at any moment charged with the woe of the world, it was unavoidable to remain rather in the dark as to the effect there of particular strokes. Something in Vanderbank’s present study of the signs accordingly showed he had had to learn to feel his way and had more or less mastered the trick. That she had turned a little pale was really the one fresh mark. “‘Funked’ it? Why in the world—?” His own colour deepened at her accent, which was a sufficient light on his having been stupid. “Do you mean you’ve declined the arrangement?”

He only, with a smile somewhat strained, continued for a moment to look at her; clearly, however, at last feeling, and not much caring, that he got in still deeper. “You’re magnificent. You’re magnificent.”

Her lovely gaze widened out. “Comment donc? Where—why? You HAVE declined her?” she went on. After which, as he replied only with a slow head-shake that seemed to say it was not for the moment all so simple as that, she had one of the inspirations to which she was constitutionally subject. “Do you imagine I want you myself?”

“Dear Mrs. Brook, you’re so admirable,” he returned with gaiety, “that if by any chance you did, upon my honour, I don’t see how I should be able not to say ‘All right.’” But he spoke too more responsibly. “I was shy of really bringing out to you what has happened to me, for a reason that I’ve of course to look in the face. Whatever you want yourself, for Nanda you want Mitchy.”

“I see, I see.” She did full justice to his explanation. “And what did you say about a ‘basis’? The blessed man offers to settle—?”

“You’re a real prodigy,” her visitor answered, “and your imagination takes its fences in a way that, when I’m out with you, quite puts mine to shame. When he mentioned it to me I was quite surprised.”

“And I,” Mrs. Brook asked, “am not surprised a bit? Isn’t it only,” she modestly suggested, “because I’ve taken him in more than you? Didn’t you know he WOULD?” she quavered.

Vanderbank thought or at least pretended to. “Make ME the condition? How could I be sure of it?”

But the point of his question was lost for her in the growing light. “Oh then the condition’s ‘you’ only—?”

“That, at any rate, is all I have to do with. He’s ready to settle if I’m ready to do the rest.”

“To propose to her straight, you mean?” She waited, but as he said nothing she went on: “And you’re not ready. Is that it?”

“I’m taking my time.”

“Of course you know,” said Mrs. Brook, “that she’d jump at you.”

He turned away from her now, but after some steps came back. “Then you do admit it.”

She hesitated. “To YOU.”

He had a strange faint smile. “Well, as I don’t speak of it—!”

“No—only to me. What is it he settles?” Mrs. Brook demanded.

“I can’t tell you.”

“You didn’t ask?”

“On the contrary I stopped him off.”

“Oh then,” Mrs. Brook exclaimed, “that’s what I call declining.”

The words appeared for an instant to strike her companion. “Is it? Is it?” he almost musingly repeated. But he shook himself the next moment free of his wonder, was more what would have been called in Buckingham Crescent on the spot. “Isn’t there rather something in my having thus thought it my duty to warn you that I’m definitely his candidate?”

Mrs. Brook turned impatiently away. “You’ve certainly—with your talk about ‘warning’—the happiest expressions!” She put her face into the flowers as he had done just before; then as she raised it: “What kind of a monster are you trying to make me out?”

“My dear lady”—Vanderbank was prompt—“I really don’t think I say anything but what’s fair. Isn’t it just my loyalty to you in fact that has in this case positively strained my discretion?”

She shook her head in mere mild despair. “‘Loyalty’ again is exquisite. The tact of men has a charm quite its own. And you’re rather good,” she continued, “as men go.”

His laugh was now a little awkward, as if she had already succeeded in making him uncomfortable. “I always become aware with you sooner or later that they don’t go at all—in your sense: but how am I, after all, so far out if you HAVE put your money on another man?”

“You keep coming back to that?” she wearily sighed.

He thought a little. “No, then. You’ve only to tell me not to, and I’ll never speak of it again.”

“You’ll be in an odd position for speaking of it if you do really go in. You deny that you’ve declined,” said Mrs. Brook; “which means then that you’ve allowed our friend to hope.”

Vanderbank met it bravely. “Yes, I think he hopes.”

“And communicates his hope to my child?”

This arrested the young man, but only for a moment. “I’ve the most perfect faith in his wisdom with her. I trust his particular delicacy. He cares more for her,” he presently added, “even than we do.”

Mrs. Brook gazed away at the infinite of space. “‘We,’ my dear Van,” she at last returned, “is one of your own real, wonderful touches. But there’s something in what you say: I HAVE, as between ourselves—between me and him—been backing Mitchy. That is I’ve been saying to him ‘Wait, wait: don’t at any rate do anything else.’ Only it’s just from the depth of my thought for my daughter’s happiness that I’ve clung to this resource. He would so absolutely, so unreservedly do anything for her.” She had reached now, with her extraordinary self-control, the pitch of quiet bland demonstration. “I want the poor thing, que diable, to have another string to her bow and another loaf, for her desolate old age, on the shelf. When everything else is gone Mitchy will still be there. Then it will be at least her own fault—!” Mrs. Brook continued. “What can relieve me of the primary duty of taking precautions,” she wound up, “when I know as well as that I stand here and look at you—”

“Yes, what?” he asked as she just paused.

“Why that so far as they count on you they count, my dear Van, on a blank.” Holding him a minute as with the soft low voice of his fate, she sadly but firmly shook her head. “You won’t do it.”

“Oh!” he almost too loudly protested.

“You won’t do it,” she went on.

“I SAY!”—he made a joke of it.

“You won’t do it,” she repeated.

It was as if he couldn’t at last but show himself really struck; yet what he exclaimed on was what might in truth most have impressed him. “You ARE magnificent, really!”

“Mr. Mitchett!” the butler, appearing at the door, almost familiarly dropped; after which Vanderbank turned straight to the person announced.

Mr. Mitchett was there, and, anticipating Mrs. Brook in receiving him, her companion passed it straighten. “She’s magnificent!”

Mitchy was already all interest. “Rather! But what’s her last?”

It had been, though so great, so subtle, as they said in Buckingham Crescent, that Vanderbank scarce knew how to put it. “Well, she’s so thoroughly superior.”

“Oh to whom do you say it?” Mitchy cried as he greeted her.

II

The subject of this eulogy had meanwhile returned to her sofa, where she received the homage of her new visitor. “It’s not I who am magnificent a bit—it’s dear Mr. Longdon. I’ve just had from Van the most wonderful piece of news about him—his announcement of his wish to make it worth somebody’s while to marry my child.”

“‘Make it’?”—Mitchy stared. “But ISN’T it?”

“My dear friend, you must ask Van. Of course you’ve always thought so. But I must tell you all the same,” Mrs. Brook went on, “that I’m delighted.”

Mitchy had seated himself, but Vanderbank remained erect and became perhaps even slightly stiff. He was not angry—no member of the inner circle at Buckingham Crescent was ever angry—but he looked grave and rather troubled. “Even if it IS decidedly fine”—he addressed his hostess straight—“I can’t make out quite why you’re doing THIS—I mean immediately making it known.”

“Ah but what do we keep from Mitchy?” Mrs. Brook asked.

“What CAN you keep? It comes to the same thing,” Mitchy said. “Besides, here we are together, share and share alike—one beautiful intelligence. Mr. Longdon’s ‘somebody’ is of course Van. Don’t try to treat me as an outsider.”

Vanderbank looked a little foolishly, though it was but the shade of a shade, from one of them to the other. “I think I’ve been rather an ass!”

“What then by the terms of our friendship—just as Mitchy says—can he and I have a better right to know and to feel with you about? You’ll want, Mitchy, won’t you?” Mrs. Brook went on, “to hear all about THAT?”

“Oh I only mean,” Vanderbank explained, “in having just now blurted my tale out to you. However, I of course do know,” he pursued to Mitchy, “that whatever’s really between us will remain between us. Let me then tell you myself exactly what’s the matter.” The length of his pause after these words showed at last that he had stopped short; on which his companions, as they waited, exchanged a sympathetic look. They waited another minute, and then he dropped into a chair where, leaning forward, his elbows on the arms and his gaze attached to the carpet, he drew out the silence. Finally he looked at Mrs. Brook. “YOU make it clear.”

The appeal called up for some reason her most infantine manner. “I don’t think I CAN, dear Van—really CLEAR. You know however yourself,” she continued to Mitchy, “enough by this time about Mr. Longdon and mamma.”

“Oh rather!” Mitchy laughed.

“And about mamma and Nanda.”

“Oh perfectly: the way Nanda reminds him, and the ‘beautiful loyalty’ that has made him take such a fancy to her. But I’ve already embraced the facts—you needn’t dot any i’s.” With another glance at his fellow visitor Mitchy jumped up and stood there florid. “He has offered you money to marry her.” He said this to Vanderbank as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“Oh NO” Mrs. Brook interposed with promptitude: “he has simply let him know before any one else that the money’s there FOR Nanda, and that therefore—!”

“First come first served?” Mitchy had already taken her up. “I see, I see. Then to make her sure of the money,” he put to Vanderbank, “you MUST marry her?”

“If it depends upon that she’ll never get it,” Mrs. Brook returned. “Dear Van will think conscientiously a lot about it, but he won’t do it.”

“Won’t you, Van, really?” Mitchy asked from the hearth-rug.

“Never, never. We shall be very kind to him, we shall help him, hope and pray for him, but we shall be at the end,” said Mrs. Brook, “just where we are now. Dear Van will have done his best, and we shall have done ours. Mr. Longdon will have done his—poor Nanda even will have done hers. But it will all have been in vain. However,” Mrs. Brook continued to expound, “she’ll probably have the money. Mr. Longdon will surely consider that she’ll want it if she doesn’t marry still more than if she does. So we shall be SO much at least,” she wound up—“I mean Edward and I and the child will be—to the good.”

Mitchy, for an equal certainty, required but an instant’s thought. “Oh there can be no doubt about THAT. The things about which your mind may now be at ease—!” he cheerfully exclaimed.

“It does make a great difference!” Mrs. Brook comfortably sighed. Then in a different tone: “What dear Van will find at the end that he can’t face will be, don’t you see? just this fact of appearing to have accepted a bribe. He won’t want, on the one hand—out of kindness for Nanda—to have the money suppressed; and yet he won’t want to have the pecuniary question mixed up with the matter: to look in short as if he had had to be paid. He’s like you, you know—he’s proud; and it will be there we shall break down.”

Mitchy had been watching his friend, who, a few minutes before perceptibly embarrassed, had quite recovered himself and, at his ease, though still perhaps with a smile a trifle strained, leaned back and let his eyes play everywhere but over the faces of the others. Vanderbank evidently wished now to show a good-humoured detachment.

“See here,” Mitchy said to him: “I remember your once submitting to me a case of some delicacy.”

“Oh he’ll submit it to you—he’ll submit it even to ME” Mrs. Brook broke in. “He’ll be charming, touching, confiding—above all he’ll be awfully INTERESTING about it. But he’ll make up his mind in his own way, and his own way won’t be to accommodate Mr. Longdon.”

Mitchy continued to study their companion in the light of these remarks, then turned upon his hostess his sociable glare. “Splendid, isn’t it, the old boy’s infatuation with him?”

Mrs. Brook just delayed. “From the point of view of the immense interest it—just now, for instance—makes for you and me? Oh yes, it’s one of our best things yet. It places him a little with Lady Fanny—‘He will, he won’t; he won’t, he will!’ Only, to be perfect, it lacks, as I say, the element of real suspense.”

Mitchy frankly wondered. “It does, you think? Not for me—not wholly.” He turned again quite pleadingly to their friend. “I hope it doesn’t for yourself totally either?”

Vanderbank, cultivating his detachment, made at first no more reply than if he had not heard, and the others meanwhile showed faces that testified perhaps less than their respective speeches had done to the absence of anxiety. The only token he immediately gave was to get up and approach Mitchy, before whom he stood a minute laughing kindly enough, though not altogether gaily. As if then for a better proof of gaiety he presently seized him by the shoulders and, still without speaking, pushed him backward into the chair he himself had just quitted. Mrs. Brook’s eyes, from the sofa, while this went on, attached themselves to her visitors. It took Vanderbank, as he moved about and his companions waited, a minute longer to produce what he had in mind. “What IS splendid, as we call it, is this extraordinary freedom and good humour of our intercourse and the fact that we do care—so independently of our personal interests, with so little selfishness or other vulgarity—to get at the idea of things. The beautiful specimen Mrs. Brook had just given me of that,” he continued to Mitchy, “was what made me break out to you about her when you came in.” He spoke to one friend, but he looked at the other. “What’s really ‘superior’ in her is that, though I suddenly show her an interference with a favourite plan, her personal resentment’s nothing—all she wants is to see what may really happen, to take in the truth of the case and make the best of that. She offers me the truth, as she sees it, about myself, and with no nasty elation if it does chance to be the truth that suits her best. It was a charming, charming stroke.”

Mitchy’s appreciation was no bar to his amusement. “You’re wonderfully right about us. But still it was a stroke.”

If Mrs. Brook was less diverted she followed perhaps more closely. “If you do me so much justice then, why did you put to me such a cold cruel question?—I mean when you so oddly challenged me on my handing on your news to Mitchy. If the principal beauty of our effort to live together is—and quite according to your own eloquence—in our sincerity, I simply obeyed the impulse to do the sincere thing. If we’re not sincere we’re nothing.”

“Nothing!”—it was Mitchy who first responded. “But we ARE sincere.”

“Yes, we ARE sincere,” Vanderbank presently said. “It’s a great chance for us not to fall below ourselves: no doubt therefore we shall continue to soar and sing. We pay for it, people who don’t like us say, in our self-consciousness—”

“But people who don’t like us,” Mitchy broke in, “don’t matter. Besides, how can we be properly conscious of each other—?”

“That’s it!”—Vanderbank completed his idea: “without my finding myself for instance in you and Mrs. Brook? We see ourselves reflected—we’re conscious of the charming whole. I thank you,” he pursued after an instant to Mrs. Brook—“I thank you for your sincerity.”

It was a business sometimes really to hold her eyes, but they had, it must be said for her, their steady moments. She exchanged with Vanderbank a somewhat remarkable look, then, with an art of her own, broke short off without appearing to drop him. “The thing is, don’t you think?”—she appealed to Mitchy—“for us not to be so awfully clever as to make it believed that we can never be simple. We mustn’t see TOO tremendous things—even in each other.” She quite lost patience with the danger she glanced at. “We CAN be simple!”

“We CAN, by God!” Mitchy laughed.

“Well, we are now—and it’s a great comfort to have it settled,” said Vanderbank.

“Then you see,” Mrs. Brook returned, “what a mistake you’d make to see abysses of subtlety in my having been merely natural.”

“We CAN be natural,” Mitchy declared.

“We can, by God!” Vanderbank laughed.

Mrs. Brook had turned to Mitchy. “I just wanted you to know. So I spoke. It’s not more complicated than that. As for WHY I wanted you to know—!”

“What better reason could there be,” Mitchy interrupted, “than your being filled to the finger-tips with the sense of how I would want it myself, and of the misery, the absolute pathos, of my being left out? Fancy, my dear chap”—he had only to put it to Van—“my NOT knowing!”.

Vanderbank evidently couldn’t fancy it, but he said quietly enough: “I should have told you myself.”

“Well, what’s the difference?”

“Oh there IS a difference,” Mrs. Brook loyally said. Then she opened an inch or two, for Vanderbank, the door of her dim radiance. “Only I should have thought it a difference for the better. Of course,” she added, “it remains absolutely with us three alone, and don’t you already feel from it the fresh charm—with it here between us—of our being together?”

It was as if each of the men had waited for the other to assent better than he himself could and Mitchy then, as Vanderbank failed, had gracefully, to cover him, changed the subject. “But isn’t Nanda, the person most interested, to know?”

Vanderbank gave on this a strange sound of hilarity. “Ah that would finish it off!”

It produced for a few seconds something like a chill, a chill that had for consequence a momentary pause which in its turn added weight to the words next uttered. “It’s not I who shall tell her,” Mrs. Brook said gently and gravely. “There!—you may be sure. If you want a promise, it’s a promise. So that if Mr. Longdon’s silent,” she went on, “and you are, Mitchy, and I am, how in the world shall she have a suspicion?”

“You mean of course except by Van’s deciding to mention it himself.”

Van might have been, from the way they looked at him, some beautiful unconscious object; but Mrs. Brook was quite ready to answer. “Oh poor man, HE’LL never breathe.”

“I see. So there we are.”

To this discussion the subject of it had for the time nothing to contribute, even when Mitchy, rising with the words he had last uttered from the chair in which he had been placed, took sociably as well, on the hearth-rug, a position before their hostess. This move ministered apparently to Vanderbank’s mere silence, for it was still without speaking that, after a little, he turned away from his friend and dropped once more into the same seat. “I’ve shown you already, you of course remember,” Vanderbank presently said to him, “that I’m perfectly aware of how much better Mrs. Brook would like YOU for the position.”

“He thinks I want him myself,” Mrs. Brook blandly explained.

She was indeed, as they always thought her, “wonderful,” but she was perhaps not even now so much so as Mitchy found himself able to be. “But how would you lose old Van—even at the worst?” he earnestly asked of her.

She just hesitated. “What do you mean by the worst?”

“Then even at the best,” Mitchy smiled. “In the event of his falsifying your prediction; which, by the way, has the danger, hasn’t it?—I mean for your intellectual credit—of making him, as we all used to be called by our nursemaids, ‘contrairy.’”

“Oh I’ve thought of that,” Mrs. Brook returned. “But he won’t do, on the whole, even for the sweetness of spiting me, what he won’t want to do. I haven’t said I should lose him,” she went on; “that’s only the view he himself takes—or, to do him perfect justice, the idea he candidly imputes to me; though without, I imagine—for I don’t go so far as that—attributing to me anything so unutterably bete as a feeling of jealousy.”

“You wouldn’t dream of my supposing anything inept of you,” Vanderbank said on this, “if you understood to the full how I keep on admiring you. Only what stupefies me a little,” he continued, “is the extraordinary critical freedom—or we may call it if we like the high intellectual detachment—with which we discuss a question touching you, dear Mrs. Brook, so nearly and engaging so your private and most sacred sentiments. What are we playing with, after all, but the idea of Nanda’s happiness?”

“Oh I’m not playing!” Mrs. Brook declared with a little rattle of emotion.

“She’s not playing”—Mr. Mitchett gravely confirmed it. “Don’t you feel in the very air the vibration of the passion that she’s simply too charming to shake at the window as the housemaid shakes the tablecloth or the jingo the flag?” Then he took up what Vanderbank had previously said. “Of course, my dear man, I’m ‘aware,’ as you just now put it, of everything, and I’m not indiscreet, am I, Mrs. Brook? in admitting for you as well as for myself that there WAS an impossibility you and I used sometimes to turn over together. Only—Lord bless us all!—it isn’t as if I hadn’t long ago seen that there’s nothing at all FOR me.”

“Ah wait, wait!” Mrs. Brook put in. “She has a theory”—Vanderbank, from his chair, lighted it up for Mitchy, who hovered before them—“that your chance WILL come, later on, after I’ve given my measure.”

“Oh but that’s exactly,” Mitchy was quick to respond, “what you’ll never do! You won’t give your measure the least little bit. You’ll walk in magnificent mystery ‘later on’ not a bit less than you do today; you’ll continue to have the benefit of everything that our imagination, perpetually engaged, often baffled and never fatigued, will continue to bedeck you with. Nanda, in the same way, to the end of all her time, will simply remain exquisite, or genuine, or generous—whatever we choose to call it. It may make a difference to us, who are comparatively vulgar, but what difference will it make to HER whether you do or you don’t decide for her? You can’t belong to her more, for herself, than you do already—and that’s precisely so much that there’s no room for any one else. Where therefore, without that room, do I come in?”

“Nowhere, I see,” Vanderbank seemed obligingly to muse.

Mrs. Brook had followed Mitchy with marked admiration, but she gave on this a glance at Van that was like the toss of a blossom from the same branch. “Oh then shall I just go on with you BOTH? That WILL be joy!” She had, however, the next thing, a sudden drop which shaded the picture. “You’re so divine, Mitchy, that how can you not in the long-run break ANY woman down?”

It was not as if Mitchy was struck—it was only that he was courteous. “What do you call the long-run? Taking about till I’m eighty?”

“Ah your genius is of a kind to which middle life will be particularly favourable. You’ll reap then somehow, one feels, everything you’ve sown.”

Mitchy still accepted the prophecy only to control it. “Do you call eighty middle life? Why, my moral beauty, my dear woman—if that’s what you mean by my genius—is precisely my curse. What on earth—is left for a man just rotten with goodness? It renders necessary the kind of liking that renders unnecessary anything else.”

“Now that IS cheap paradox!” Vanderbank patiently sighed. “You’re down for a fine.”

It was with less of the patience perhaps that Mrs. Brook took this up. “Yes, on that we ARE stiff. Five pounds, please.”

Mitchy drew out his pocket-book even though he explained. “What I mean is that I don’t give out the great thing.” With which he produced a crisp banknote.

“DON’T you?” asked Vanderbank, who, having taken it from him to hand to Mrs. Brook, held it a moment, delicately, to accentuate the doubt.

“The great thing’s the sacred terror. It’s you who give THAT out.”

“Oh!”—and Vanderbank laid the money on the small stand at Mrs. Brook’s elbow.

“Ain’t I right, Mrs. Brook?—doesn’t he, tremendously, and isn’t that more than anything else what does it?”

The two again, as if they understood each other, gazed in a unity of interest at their companion, who sustained it with an air clearly intended as the happy mean between embarrassment and triumph. Then Mrs. Brook showed she liked the phrase. “The sacred terror! Yes, one feels it. It IS that.”

“The finest case of it,” Mitchy pursued, “that I’ve ever met. So my moral’s sufficiently pointed.”

“Oh I don’t think it can be said to be that,” Vanderbank returned, “till you’ve put the whole thing into a box by doing for Nanda what she does most want you to do.”

Mitchy caught on without a shade of wonder. “Oh by proposing to the Duchess for little Aggie?” He took but an instant to turn it over. “Well, I WOULD propose—to please Nanda. Only I’ve never yet quite made out the reason of her wish.”

“The reason is largely,” his friend answered, “that, being very fond of Aggie and in fact extremely admiring her, she wants to do something good for her and to keep her from anything bad. Don’t you know—it’s too charming—she regularly believes in her?” Mitchy, with all his recognition, vibrated to the touch. “Isn’t it too charming?”

“Well then,” Vanderbank went on, “she secures for her friend a phoenix like you, and secures for you a phoenix like her friend. It’s hard to say for which of you she desires most to do the handsome thing. She loves you both in short”—he followed it up—“though perhaps when one thinks of it the price she puts on you, Mitchy, in the arrangement, is a little the higher. Awfully fine at any rate—and yet awfully odd too—her feeling for Aggie’s type, which is divided by such abysses from her own.”

“Ah,” laughed Mitchy, “but think then of her feeling for mine!”

Vanderbank, still more at his ease now and with his head back, had his eyes aloft and far. “Oh there are things in Nanda—!” The others exchanged a glance at this, while their companion added: “Little Aggie’s really the sort of creature she would have liked to be able to be.”

“Well,” Mitchy said, “I should have adored her even if she HAD been able.”

Mrs. Brook had for some minutes played no audible part, but the acute observer we are constantly taking for granted would perhaps have detected in her, as one of the effects of the special complexion to-day of Vanderbank’s presence, a certain smothered irritation. “She couldn’t possibly have been able,” she now interposed, “with so loose—or rather, to express it more properly, with so perverse—a mother.”

“And yet, my dear lady,” Mitchy promptly qualified, “how if in little Aggie’s case the Duchess hasn’t prevented—?”

Mrs. Brook was full of wisdom. “Well, it’s a different thing. I’m not, as a mother—am I, Van?—bad ENOUGH. That’s what’s the matter with me. Aggie, don’t you see? is the Duchess’s morality, her virtue; which, by having it that way outside of you, as one may say, you can make a much better thing of. The child has been for Jane, I admit, a capital little subject, but Jane has kept her on hand and finished her like some wonderful piece of stitching. Oh as work it’s of a soigne! There it is—to show. A woman like me has to be HERSELF, poor thing, her virtue and her morality. What will you have? It’s our lumbering English plan.”

“So that her daughter,” Mitchy sympathised, “can only, by the arrangement, hope to become at the best her immorality and her vice?”

But Mrs. Brook, without an answer for the question, appeared suddenly to have plunged into a sea of thought. “The only way for Nanda to have been REALLY nice—!”

“Would have been for YOU to be like Jane?”

Mitchy and his hostess seemed for a minute, on this, to gaze together at the tragic truth. Then she shook her head. “We see our mistakes too late.” She repeated the movement, but as if to let it all go, and Vanderbank meanwhile, pulling out his watch, had got up with a laugh that showed some inattention and made to Mitchy a remark about their walking away together. Mitchy, engaged for the instant with Mrs. Brook, had assented only with a nod, but the attitude of the two men had become that of departure. Their friend looked at them as if she would like to keep one of them, and for a purpose connected somehow with the other, but was oddly, almost ludicrously, embarrassed to choose. What was in her face indeed during this short passage might prove to have been, should we penetrate, the flicker of a sense that in spite of all intimacy and amiability they could, at bottom and as things commonly turned out, only be united against her. Yet she made at the end a sort of choice in going on to Mitchy: “He hasn’t at all told you the real reason of Nanda’s idea that you should go in for Aggie.”

“Oh I draw the line there,” said Vanderbank. “Besides, he understands that too.”

Mitchy, on the spot, did himself and every one justice. “Why it just disposes of me, doesn’t it?”

It made Vanderbank, restless now and turning about the room, stop with a smile at Mrs. Brook. “We understand too well!”

“Not if he doesn’t understand,” she replied after a moment while she turned to Mitchy, “that his real ‘combination’ can in the nature of the case only be—!”

“Oh yes”—Mitchy took her straight up—“with the young thing who is, as you say, positively and helplessly modern and the pious fraud of whose classic identity with a sheet of white paper has been—ah tacitly of course, but none the less practically!—dropped. You’ve so often reminded me. I do understand. If I were to go in for Aggie it would only be to oblige. The modern girl, the product of our hard London facts and of her inevitable consciousness of them just as they are—she, wonderful being, IS, I fully recognise, my real affair, and I’m not ashamed to say that when I like the individual I’m not afraid of the type. She knows too much—I don’t say; but she doesn’t know after all a millionth part of what I do.”

“I’m not sure!” Mrs. Brook earnestly exclaimed.

He had rung out and he kept it up with a limpidity unusual. “And product for product, when you come to that, I’m a queerer one myself than any other. The traditions I smash!” Mitchy laughed.

Mrs. Brook had got up and Vanderbank had gone again to the window. “That’s exactly why,” she returned. “You’re a pair of monsters and your monstrosity fits. She does know too much,” she added.

“Well,” said Mitchy with resolution, “it’s all my fault.”

“Not ALL—unless,” Mrs. Brook returned, “that’s only a sweet way of saying that it’s mostly mine.”

“Oh yours too—immensely; in fact every one’s. Even Edward’s, I dare say; and certainly, unmistakably, Harold’s. Ah and Van’s own—rather!” Mitchy continued; “for all he turns his back and will have nothing to say to it.”

It was on the back Vanderbank turned that Mrs. Brook’s eyes now rested. “That’s precisely why he shouldn’t be afraid of her.”

He faced straight about. “Oh I don’t deny my part.”

He shone at them brightly enough, and Mrs. Brook, thoughtful, wistful, candid, took in for a moment the radiance. “And yet to think that after all it has been mere TALK!”

Something in her tone again made her hearers laugh out; so it was still with the air of good humour that Vanderbank answered: “Mere, mere, mere. But perhaps it’s exactly the ‘mere’ that has made us range so wide.”

Mrs. Brook’s intelligence abounded. “You mean that we haven’t had the excuse of passion?”

Her companions once more gave way to mirth, but “There you are!” Vanderbank said after an instant less sociably. With it too he held out his hand.

“You ARE afraid,” she answered as she gave him her own; on which, as he made no rejoinder, she held him before her. “Do you mean you REALLY don’t know if she gets it?”

“The money, if he DOESN’T go in?”—Mitchy broke almost with an air of responsibility into Vanderbank’s silence. “Ah but, as we said, surely—!”

It was Mitchy’s eyes that Vanderbank met. “Yes, I should suppose she gets it.”

“Perhaps then, as a compensation, she’ll even get MORE—!”

“If I don’t go in? Oh!” said Vanderbank. And he changed colour.

He was by this time off, but Mrs. Brook kept Mitchy a moment. “Now—by that suggestion—he has something to show. He won’t go in.”

III

Her visitors had been gone half an hour, but she was still in the drawing-room when Nanda came back. The girl found her, on the sofa, in a posture that might have represented restful oblivion, but that, after a glance, our young lady appeared to interpret as mere intensity of thought. It was a condition from which at all events Mrs. Brook was quickly roused by her daughter’s presence: she opened her eyes and put down her feet, so that the two were confronted as closely as persons may be when it is only one of them who looks at the other. Nanda, gazing vaguely about and not seeking a seat, slowly drew off her gloves while her mother’s sad eyes considered her from top to toe. “Tea’s gone,” Mrs. Brook then said as if there were something in the loss peculiarly irretrievable. “But I suppose,” she added, “he gave you all you want.”

“Oh dear yes, thank you—I’ve had lots.”

Nanda hovered there slim and charming, feathered and ribboned, dressed in thin fresh fabrics and faint colours, with something in the effect of it all to which the sweeter deeper melancholy in her mother’s eyes seemed happily to testify. “Just turn round, dear.” The girl immediately obeyed, and Mrs. Brook once more took everything in. “The back’s best—only she didn’t do what she said she would. How they do lie!” she gently quavered.

“Yes, but we lie so to THEM.” Nanda had swung round again, producing evidently on her mother’s part, by the admirable “hang” of her light skirts, a still deeper peace. “Do you mean the middle fold?—I knew she wouldn’t. I don’t want my back to be best—I don’t walk backward.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Brook resignedly mused; “you dress for yourself.”

“Oh how can you say that,” the girl asked, “when I never stick in a pin but what I think of YOU!”

“Well,” Mrs. Brook moralised, “one must always, I consider, think, as a sort of point de repere, of some one good person. Only it’s best if it’s a person one’s afraid of. You do very well, but I’m not enough. What one really requires is a kind of salutary terror. I never stick in a pin without thinking of your Cousin Jane. What is it that some one quotes somewhere about some one’s having said that ‘Our antagonist is our helper—he prevents our being superficial’? The extent to which with my poor clothes the Duchess prevents ME—!” It was a measure Mrs. Brook could give only by the general soft wail of her submission to fate.

“Yes, the Duchess isn’t a woman, is she? She’s a standard.”

The speech had for Nanda’s companion, however, no effect of pleasantry or irony, and it was a mark of the special intercourse of these good friends that though they showed each other, in manner and tone, such sustained consideration as might almost have given it the stamp of diplomacy, there was yet in it also something of that economy of expression which is the result of a common experience. The recurrence of opportunity to observe them together would have taught a spectator that—on Mrs. Brook’s side doubtless more particularly—their relation was governed by two or three remarkably established and, as might have been said, refined laws, the spirit of which was to guard against the vulgarity so often coming to the surface between parent and child. That they WERE as good friends as if Nanda had not been her daughter was a truth that no passage between them might fail in one way or another to illustrate. Nanda had gathered up, for that matter, early in life, a flower of maternal wisdom: “People talk about conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you’re nice to the second housemaid.” Mrs. Brook was as “nice” to Nanda as she was to Sarah Curd—which involved, as may easily be imagined, the happiest conditions for Sarah. “Well,” she resumed, reverting to the Duchess on a final appraisement of the girl’s air, “I really think I do well by you and that Jane wouldn’t have anything to say to-day. You look awfully like mamma,” she then threw off as if for the first time of mentioning it.

“Oh Cousin Jane doesn’t care for that,” Nanda returned. “What I don’t look like is Aggie, for all I try.”

“Ah you shouldn’t try—you can do nothing with it. One must be what one is.”

Mrs. Brook was almost sententious, but Nanda, with civility, let it pass. “No one in London touches her. She’s quite by herself. When one sees her one feels her to be the real thing.”

Mrs. Brook, without harshness, wondered. “What do you mean by the real thing?”

Even Nanda, however, had to think a moment.

“Well, the real young one. That’s what Lord Petherton calls her,” she mildly joked—“‘the young ‘un’”

Her mother’s echo was not for the joke, but for something else. “I know what you mean. What’s the use of being good?”

“Oh I didn’t mean that,” said Nanda. “Besides, isn’t Aggie of a goodness—?”

“I wasn’t talking of her. I was asking myself what’s the use of MY being.”

“Well, you can’t help it any more than the Duchess can help—!”

“Ah but she could if she would!” Mrs. Brook broke in with a sharper ring than she had yet given. “We can’t help being good perhaps, if that burden’s laid on us—but there are lengths in other directions we’re not absolutely obliged to go. And what I think of when I stick in the pins,” she went on, “is that Jane seems to me really never to have had to pay.” She appeared for a minute to brood on this till she could no longer bear it; after which she jerked out: “Why she has never had to pay for ANYthing!”

Nanda had by this time seated herself, taking her place, under the interest of their talk, on her mother’s sofa, where, except for the removal of her long soft gloves, which one of her hands again and again drew caressingly through the other, she remained very much as if she were some friendly yet circumspect young visitor to whom Mrs. Brook had on some occasion dropped “DO come.” But there was something perhaps more expressly conciliatory in the way she had kept everything on: as if, in particular serenity and to confirm kindly Mrs. Brook’s sense of what had been done for her, she had neither taken off her great feathered hat nor laid down her parasol of pale green silk, the “match” of hat and ribbons and which had an expensive precious knob. Our spectator would possibly have found too much earnestness in her face to be sure if there was also candour. “And do you mean that YOU have had to pay—?”

“Oh yes—all the while.” With this Mrs. Brook was a little short, and also as she added as if to banish a slight awkwardness: “But don’t let it discourage you.”

Nanda seemed an instant to weigh the advice, and the whole thing would have been striking as another touch in the picture of the odd want, on the part of each, of any sense of levity in the other. Whatever escape, face to face, mother or daughter might ever seek would never be the humorous one—a circumstance, notwithstanding, that would not in every case have failed to make their interviews droll for a third person. It would always indeed for such a person have produced an impression of tension beneath the surface. “I could have done much better at the start and have lost less time,” the girl at last said, “if I hadn’t had the drawback of not really remembering Granny.”

“Oh well, I remember her!” Mrs. Brook moaned with an accent that evidently struck her the next moment as so much out of place that she slightly deflected. She took Nanda’s parasol and held it as if—a more delicate thing much than any one of hers—she simply liked to have it. “Her clothes—at your age at least—must have been hideous. Was it at the place he took you to that he gave you tea?” she then went on.

“Yes, at the Museum. We had an orgy in the refreshment-room. But he took me afterwards to Tishy’s, where we had another.”

“He went IN with you?” Mrs. Brook had suddenly flashed into eagerness.

“Oh yes—I made him.”

“He didn’t want to?”

“On the contrary—very much. But he doesn’t do everything he wants,” said Nanda.

Mrs. Brook seemed to wonder. “You mean you’ve also to want it?”

“Oh no—THAT isn’t enough. What I suppose I mean,” Nanda continued, “is that he doesn’t do anything he doesn’t want. But he does quite enough,” she added.

“And who then was at Tishy’s?”

“Oh poor old Tish herself, naturally, and Carrie Donner.”

“And no one else?”

The girl just waited. “Yes, Mr. Cashmore came in.”

Her mother gave a groan of impatience. “Ah AGAIN?”

Nanda thought an instant. “How do you mean, ‘again’? He just lives there as much as he ever did, and Tishy can’t prevent him.”

“I was thinking of Mr. Longdon—of THEIR meeting. When he met him here that time he liked it so little. Did he like it any more to-day?” Mrs. Brook quavered.

“Oh no, he hated it.”

“But hadn’t he—if he should go in—known he WOULD?”

“Yes, perfectly. But he wanted to see.”

“To see—?” Mrs. Brook just threw out.

“Well, where I go so much. And he knew I wished it.”

“I don’t quite see why,” Mrs. Brook mildly observed. And then as her daughter said nothing to help her: “At any rate he did loathe it?”

Nanda, for a reply, simply after an instant put a question. “Well, how can he understand?”

“You mean, like me, why you do go there so much? How can he indeed?”

“I don’t mean that,” the girl returned—“it’s just that he understands perfectly, because he saw them all, in such an extraordinary way—well, what can I ever call it?—clutch me and cling to me.”

Mrs. Brook, with full gravity, considered this picture. “And was Mr. Cashmore to-day so ridiculous?”

“Ah he’s not ridiculous, mamma—he’s very unhappy. He thinks now Lady Fanny probably won’t go, but he feels that may be after all only the worse for him.”

“She WILL go,” Mrs. Brook answered with one of her roundabout approaches to decision. “He IS too great an idiot. She was here an hour ago, and if ever a woman was packed—!”

“Well,” Nanda objected, “but doesn’t she spend her time in packing and unpacking?”

This enquiry, however, scarce pulled up her mother. “No—though she HAS, no doubt, hitherto wasted plenty of labour. She has now a dozen boxes—I could see them there in her wonderful eyes—just waiting to be called for. So if you’re counting on her not going, my dear—!” Mrs. Brook gave a head-shake that was the warning of wisdom.

“Oh I don’t care what she does!” Nanda replied. “What I meant just now was that Mr. Longdon couldn’t understand why, with so much to make them so, they couldn’t be decently happy.”

“And did he wish you to explain?”

“I tried to, but I didn’t make it any better. He doesn’t like them. He doesn’t even care for Tish.”

“He told you so—right out?”

“Oh,” Nanda said, “of course I asked him. I didn’t press him, because I never do—!”

“You never do?” Mrs. Brook broke in as with the glimpse of a new light.

The girl showed an indulgence for this interest that was for a moment almost elderly. “I enjoy awfully with him seeing just how to take him.”

Her tone and her face evidently put forth for her companion at this juncture something freshly, even quite supremely suggestive; and yet the effect of them on Mrs. Brook’s part was only a question so off-hand that it might already often have been asked. The mother’s eyes, to ask it, we may none the less add, attached themselves closely to the daughter’s, and her face just glowed. “You like him so very awfully?”

It was as if the next instant Nanda felt herself on her guard. Yet she spoke with a certain surrender. “Well, it’s rather intoxicating to be one’s self—!” She had only a drop over the choice of her term.

“So tremendously made up to, you mean—even by a little fussy ancient man? But DOESN’T he, my dear,” Mrs. Brook continued with encouragement, “make up to you?”

A supposititious spectator would certainly on this have imagined in the girl’s face the delicate dawn of a sense that her mother had suddenly become vulgar, together with a general consciousness that the way to meet vulgarity was always to be frank and simple and above all to ignore. “He makes one enjoy being liked so much—liked better, I do think, than I’ve ever been liked by any one.”

If Mrs. Brook hesitated it was, however, clearly not because she had noticed. “Not better surely than by dear Mitchy? Or even if you come to that by Tishy herself.”

Nanda’s simplicity maintained itself. “Oh Mr. Longdon’s different from Tishy.”

Her mother again hesitated. “You mean of course he knows more?”

The girl considered it. “He doesn’t know MORE. But he knows other things. And he’s pleasanter than Mitchy.”

“You mean because he doesn’t want to marry you?”

It was as if she had not heard that Nanda continued: “Well, he’s more beautiful.”

“O-oh!” cried Mrs. Brook, with a drawn-out extravagance of comment that amounted to an impugnment of her taste even by herself.

It contributed to Nanda’s quietness. “He’s one of the most beautiful people in the world.”

Her companion at this, with a quick wonder, fixed her. “DOES he, my dear, want to marry you?”

“Yes—to all sorts of ridiculous people.”

“But I mean—would you take HIM?”

Nanda, rising, met the question with a short ironic “Yes!” that showed her first impatience. “It’s so charming being liked without being approved.”

But Mrs. Brook only wanted to know. “He doesn’t approve—?”

“No, but it makes no difference. It’s all exactly right—it doesn’t matter.”

Mrs. Brook seemed to wonder, however, exactly how these things could be. “He doesn’t want you to give up anything?” She looked as if swiftly thinking what Nanda MIGHT give up.

“Oh yes, everything.”

It was as if for an instant she found her daughter inscrutable; then she had a strange smile. “Me?”

The girl was perfectly prompt. “Everything. But he wouldn’t like me nearly so much if I really did.”

Her mother had a further pause. “Does he want to ADOPT you?” Then more quickly and sadly, though also a little as if lacking nerve to push the research: “We couldn’t give you up, Nanda.”

“Thank you so much, mamma. But we shan’t be very much tried,” Nanda said, “because what it comes to seems to be that I’m really what you may call adopting HIM. I mean I’m little by little changing him—gradually showing him that, as I couldn’t possibly have been different, and as also of course one can’t keep giving up, the only way is for him not to mind, and to take me just as I am. That, don’t you see? is what he would never have expected to do.”

Mrs. Brook recognised in a manner the explanation, but still had her wistfulness. “But—a—to take you, ‘as you are,’ WHERE?”

“Well, to the South Kensington Museum.”

“Oh!” said Mrs. Brook. Then, however, in a more exemplary tone: “Do you enjoy so very much your long hours with him?”

Nanda appeared for an instant to think how to express it. “Well, we’re great friends.”

“And always talking about Granny?”

“Oh no—really almost never now.”

“He doesn’t think so awfully much of her?” There was an oddity of eagerness in the question—a hope, a kind of dash, for something that might have been in Nanda’s interest.

The girl met these things only with obliging gravity. “I think he’s losing any sense of my likeness. He’s too used to it—or too many things that are too different now cover it up.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Brook as she took this in, “I think it’s awfully clever of you to get only the good of him and have none of the worry.”

Nanda wondered. “The worry?”

“You leave that all to ME,” her mother went on, but quite forgivingly. “I hope at any rate that the good, for you, will be real.”

“Real?” the girl, remaining vague, again echoed.

Mrs. Brook showed for this not perhaps an irritation, but a flicker of austerity. “You must remember we’ve a great many things to think about. There are things we must take for granted in each other—we must all help in our way to pull the coach. That’s what I mean by worry, and if you don’t have any so much the better for you. For me it’s in the day’s work. Your father and I have most to think about always at this time, as you perfectly know—when we have to turn things round and manage somehow or other to get out of town, have to provide and pinch, to meet all the necessities, with money, money, money at every turn running away like water. The children this year seem to fit into nothing, into nowhere, and Harold’s more dreadful than he has ever been, doing nothing at all for himself and requiring everything to be done for him. He talks about his American girl, with millions, who’s so awfully taken with him, but I can’t find out anything about her: the only one, just now, that people seem to have heard of is the one Booby Manger’s engaged to. The Mangers literally snap up everything,” Mrs. Brook quite wailingly now continued: “the Jew man, so gigantically rich—who is he? Baron Schack or Schmack—who has just taken Cumberland House and who has the awful stammer—or what is it? no roof to his mouth—is to give that horrid little Algie, to do his conversation for him, four hundred a year, which Harold pretended to me that, of all the rush of young men—dozens!—HE was most in the running for. Your father’s settled gloom is terrible, and I bear all the brunt of it; we get literally nothing this year for the Hovel, yet have to spend on it heaven knows what; and everybody, for the next three months, in Scotland and everywhere, has asked us for the wrong time and nobody for the right: so that I assure you I don’t know where to turn—which doesn’t however in the least prevent every one coming to me with their own selfish troubles.” It was as if Mrs. Brook had found the cup of her secret sorrows suddenly jostled by some touch of which the perversity, though not completely noted at the moment, proved, as she a little let herself go, sufficient to make it flow over; but she drew, the next thing, from her daughter’s stillness a reflexion of the vanity of such heat and speedily recovered herself as if in order with more dignity to point the moral. “I can carry my burden and shall do so to the end; but we must each remember that we shall fall to pieces if we don’t manage to keep hold of some little idea of responsibility. I positively can’t arrange without knowing when it is you go to him.”

“To Mr. Longdon? Oh whenever I like,” Nanda replied very gently and simply.

“And when shall you be so good as to like?”

“Well, he goes himself on Saturday, and if I want I can go a few days later.”

“And what day can you go if I want?” Mrs. Brook spoke as with a small sharpness—just softened indeed in time—produced by the sight of a freedom in her daughter’s life that suddenly loomed larger than any freedom of her own. It was still a part of the unsteadiness of the vessel of her anxieties; but she never after all remained publicly long subject to the influence she often comprehensively designated to others as well as to herself as “nastiness.” “What I mean is that you might go the same day, mightn’t you?”

“With him—in the train? I should think so if you wish it.”

“But would HE wish it? I mean would he hate it?”

“I don’t think so at all, but I can easily ask him.”

Mrs. Brook’s head inclined to the chimney and her eyes to the window. “Easily?”

Nanda looked for a moment mystified by her mother’s insistence. “I can at any rate perfectly try it.”

“Remembering even that mamma would never have pushed so?”

Nanda’s face seemed to concede even that condition. “Well,” she at all events serenely replied, “I really think we’re good friends enough for anything.”

It might have been, for the light it quickly produced, exactly what her mother had been working to make her say. “What do you call that then, I should like to know, but his adopting you?”

“Ah I don’t know that it matters much what it’s called.”

“So long as it brings with it, you mean,” Mrs. Brook asked, “all the advantages?”

“Well yes,” said Nanda, who had now begun dimly to smile—“call them advantages.”

Mrs. Brook had a pause. “One would be quite ready to do that if one only knew a little more exactly what they’re to consist of.”

“Oh the great advantage, I feel, is doing something for HIM.”

Nanda’s companion, at this, hesitated afresh. “But doesn’t that, my dear, put the extravagance of your surrender to him on rather an odd footing? Charity, love, begins at home, and if it’s a question of merely GIVING, you’ve objects enough for your bounty without going so far.”

The girl, as her stare showed, was held a moment by her surprise, which presently broke out. “Why, I thought you wanted me so to be nice to him!”

“Well, I hope you won’t think me very vulgar,” said Mrs. Brook, “if I tell you that I want you still more to have some idea of what you’ll get by it. I’ve no wish,” she added, “to keep on boring you with Mitchy—”

“Don’t, don’t!” Nanda pleaded.

Her mother stopped as short as if there had been something in her tone to set the limit the more utterly for being unstudied. Yet poor Mrs. Brook couldn’t leave it there. “Then what do you get instead?”

“Instead of Mitchy? Oh,” said Nanda, “I shall never marry.”

Mrs. Brook at this turned away, moving over to the window with quickened weariness. Nanda, on her side, as if their talk had ended, went across to the sofa to take up her parasol before leaving the room, an impulse rather favoured than arrested by the arrival of her brother Harold, who came in at the moment both his relatives had turned a back to the door and who gave his sister, as she faced him, a greeting that made their mother look round. “Hallo, Nan—you ARE lovely! Ain’t she lovely, mother?”

“No!” Mrs. Brook answered, not, however, otherwise noticing him. Her domestic despair centred at this instant all in her daughter. “Well then, we shall consider—your father and I—that he must take the consequence.”

Nanda had now her hand on the door, while Harold had dropped on the sofa. “‘He’?” she just sounded.

“I mean Mr. Longdon.”

“And what do you mean by the consequence?”

“Well, it will do for the beginning of it that you’ll please go down WITH him.”

“On Saturday then? Thanks, mamma,” the girl returned.

She was instantly gone, on which Mrs. Brook had more attention for her son. This, after an instant, as she approached the sofa and raised her eyes from the little table beside it, came straight out. “Where in the world is that five-pound note?”

Harold looked vacantly about him. “What five-pound note?”